Warrantless wiretaps. The Patriot Act. Presidential secrecy. For seven years, civil libertarians and open-government advocates have felt they've been wandering in the wilderness, with few allies in Congress and a White House that only gets bolder in its contempt.

But now, with "change" the watchword in both Democratic presidential bids, and top committee heads in Congress flexing forgotten oversight muscles, activists are daring to look to 2009 as the Promised Land, where a new president joins with a fed-up Congress to lead America into a new era.

"A lot are talking about the post-Watergate Congress of 1974," said Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "There is a real feeling we may have proposals for the kind of sweeping government reform that Congress pushed through after the Nixon impeachment in July 1974."

Those reforms amounted to some of the most sweeping restraints on U.S. executive power in a century. But some advocates think Rotenberg and other optimists are setting themselves up for a grave disappointment. They point to the lackluster civil liberties records of previous Democratic leaders, Bill Clinton in particular, and to the complex system of fear, secrecy and political self-interest assembled during the Bush presidency – a machine, they say, that's not easily dismantled.

"There is so much money in the terrorism trough," says Steven Aftergood, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy Project. "There are constituencies within agencies who are going to be advocating for retention of those practices. It will take a lot of work to roll back practices that have been entrenched for the last seven years."

The current dark days started before 9/11, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft directed government agencies to start finding excuses to withhold documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. After 9/11 came an obsession with secrecy and loyalty, the Patriot Act, an intense classification scheme and a top-secret warrantless-wiretapping program targeting Americans, among other things.

With the Bush administration entering its final throes, it's tempting to think a new day is dawning, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien says – particularly with self-described change candidate Barack Obama ahead in the Democratic primary and polling well among the electorate.

But Tien advises against excessive hope, given the pressure that any president will feel to stop another terrorist attack, and the White House's traditional need to keep the intelligence community happy.

"People in power do what people in power do," Tien says. "One hopes that Obama would be different, but I don't know. You can't count on it."

Indeed, civil libertarians have been let down before by politicians in both parties. As a U.S. senator, Republican John Ashcroft battled efforts to regulate the use of cryptography in the United States, and spoke often about privacy. Then he was named Attorney General, and his views seemingly changed overnight.

And in 1993, the Democratic Clinton administration proposed and championed the doomed Clipper Chip, an encryption scheme designed with a back door for the federal government; Clinton hoped to make all other strong encryption illegal for use by U.S. civilians.

"Bill Clinton wasn't anything special on this issue," Tien says. "I don't think anyone ever is."

Clinton's Justice Department also won passage of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which required phone companies – and now broadband internet providers – to make their systems more easily wiretapped. And his was also the first Justice Department to use secret wiretap evidence in deportation proceedings, something the ACLU fought hard against.

"Those were all disappointments to the civil liberties community," says Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

But Rotenberg has hope, and he's already begun referring to President Bush in the past tense. "He was so fanatical about secrecy," he says. "You have to believe the pendulum will swing back."

Rotenberg and others are dreaming of a 35th anniversary return of 1974. That's the year Congress reacted to Watergate by passing a slew of laws opening up the government and limiting its powers – measures like the Privacy Act, which mostly forbids secret databases about American citizens, and a measure that strengthened the formerly anemic Freedom of Information Act.

That same Congress set in motion the Church Committee, led by moderate Idaho Democrat Frank Church, that investigated and exposed rampant domestic spying and ill-fated foreign meddling by the CIA and FBI. One outcome of that commission was 1978's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA – the law that, decades later, President Bush was destined to break.

Like Rotenberg, Conrad Martin, executive director of the Fund for Constitutional Government, sees a constellation in the political skies that looks much like 1974: an unpopular war built on delusions and false information, oil prices on the rise, public dissatisfaction with Congress and the president.

But even he admits that there are differences today. "In 1974 with the reform Congress, the one big difference was the outrage," Conrad Martin said.

For example, when the country learned about the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) spying on American dissidents, the question the nation asked was, "What are you doing wiretapping Martin Luther King and members of Congress?" Martin adds: "The same with Pentagon Papers – the question was, 'What are you doing bombing Cambodia in secret?'"

"We do need to ask, 'Where is the outrage?'" Martin says. "We are not doing our job of putting this in context – the reason you have FISA is that they were wiretapping the dissidents."

Moreover, a new round of reform would almost certainly be predicated on hearings probing the activities of the Bush administration. Americans are not widely clamoring for such investigations, and even liberal-leaning Congressional watchdogs may not "have the balls to do it," Martin says.

"I don't give great odds on that," Tien agrees.

Kate Martin says that at this point, she'd be satisfied with a return to the days of Bill Clinton.

"There was open consultation between the administration and Congress, and there was sensitivity and concern on part of the Department of Justice," Martin says. "It was much more of a transparent and open discussion of what the policies should be, and none of these were true about this administration when it decided to change the rules on investigations and surveillance.

"And there wasn't the rhetoric of, 'And if you don't do this, there will be blood on your hands,' which I think is an abuse of the political process," Martin adds.

Gary Bass, executive director of OMBWatch, says that in retrospect, the Clinton years were good ones for transparency. But when he ruminates on what he thought back then, he considers it a mixed bag.

"The negative things were things like the secrecy of Hillary Clinton's health-care task force," Bass says. On the other hand, former Vice President Al Gore pushed the government to get on the information superhighway, according to Bass, which led to "really huge strides" in transparency, such as online access to government documents.

Bass' group is nonpartisan, but on transparency issues, he has a clear favorite.

"I think Obama is looking great," Bass said. "Clinton is a mixed bag, just like her husband, and McCain has been supportive when it serves his needs."

Greg Nojeim, a lawyer at the Center of Democracy and Technology, thinks whoever takes over the presidency in 2009 will find themselves caught in a world where laws, technology and the drive to prevent terrorism and crimes are colliding at every turn.

"Technology is changing rapidly, making more and more personal information available to the government," Nojeim says. "The law hasn't kept up, and the privacy aspects have not kept up, and terrorism remains a threat.

"In a sense it's the perfect storm, and the new president will walk into middle of it and he or she will either be consumed by it or become the master of that storm by taking the initiative."