A Neighbor’s View by Dan Warner

The posh-to-super-posh community of Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb of Houston, took a survey and found that 70 percent of the people oppose a plan to put license plate cameras at every entrance to the city.

The city fathers said "pfffttttt" to that and are going to do it anyway. A city spokeswoman said the pictures of every car going in and out would be "for investigative purposes only," accessible only to the police and would be kept for just 30 days.

So much for the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights and other provisions of our Constitution have been gone anyway, what with presidents starting wars all over the world without even a nod to Congress and the National Security Administration recording everything from whom we call to who calls us to our facial images. The spooks can find us whenever they want.

With Independence Day fast approaching, I got out my dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution and read the Bill of Rights for the umpteenth time.

It dawned on me as I read that the reason the Bill of Rights were added to the Constitution has been lost to the American people.

It was not just that freedom of speech, religion or the press sounded nice. Nor was it simply 'kinda' good that the police can't come crashing into your house for no reason, or that a judge can't toss you in the pokey without due process. Or that punishment cannot be cruel and unusual (though one has to wonder what could be more cruel than 23 hours a day in an 8-by-10-foot cell in a Super Max Prison), or that we all have the right to face our accusers.

We are blessed with all sorts of safeguards against being oppressed by tyrants and Big Government, though they are much the same thing.

The Bill of Rights is not some utopian dream, but, rather, a method of assuring that the "real and natural" rights of the people are preserved.

The preservation of those rights did not come from a background of idealism but from reality — a history of negation of those rights by England's King George and other governments around the world.

That need to protect citizens has pretty much been forgotten by recent generations. It is time to reclaim those rights — even if it means taking some drastic action.

Hooray for Edward Snowden, the NSA spy who revealed our vulnerability to us and then fled to Russia. He is a hero.

If 70 percent of the people of a city object to having their privacy destroyed, then they should have a right to rule, not some powerful government body, even if it was elected.

And if we want our call to Aunt Maude on her birthday to be a secret, it should not be stored in some huge, intrusive governmental database.

This is no small thing. Our freedoms are being crushed. Snap to, America.

Pulitzer Prize winning editor Dan Warner of south Fort Myers led newspapers in Massachusetts, Ohio and Maine. He formerly worked as a writer and editorial board member for The News-Press. Email him at djwarner1@yahoo.com. Twitter: @_djwarner1.