Unlike many libertarians, Harvey Silvergate and Carl Takei don't see the PATRIOT act as the biggest threat to civil liberties in the US. They are more worried about what they believe to be the undermining of the little known legal writ of 'habeus corpus' (essentially a legal challenge to the detention of someone in either official custody or private hands).

"THIS IS NOT the first time the executive branch has tried to limit habeas corpus. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law created a series of procedural hurdles making it more difficult for civilians charged with criminal offenses to use habeas to challenge the validity of an original trial on appeal...

The current curtailment of the writ is even more dangerous than President Lincoln?s wartime suspension of habeas. Lincoln, though he initially acted on his own, sought congressional authorization as soon as practicable, calling a special session to consider his wartime measures...

For civil libertarians, of course, the most egregious example of past habeas corpus violations remains the notorious internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The facts are well-known: the US government forced some 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, out of their homes and into military internment camps for the duration of the war, allegedly because suspected saboteurs were hiding in Japanese-American communities. In a 1944 decision widely criticized as a nadir for American civil liberties and judicial review, the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States gave the internment program the imprimatur of constitutionality. In this extraordinary move, the judiciary deferred to a military measure that treated citizens like prisoners of war...

Yet in three important respects the Japanese internment cases did less damage to basic principles of democracy than today?s assault on habeas corpus threatens to do. First, in the WWII cases, the government felt compelled to concoct an elaborate lie to convince the court of its noble intentions, which suggests that it took seriously the need to persuade the court that detention was necessary. Today the government is not showing even that backhanded measure of deference to a co-equal branch of government, choosing instead to submit nothing more than two-to-three-page statements written by officials without firsthand knowledge and expecting courts to acquiesce without questioning the evidence or hearing anything from the other side. Second, in the WWII cases, detained citizens had the opportunity to consult lawyers and attempt to rebut falsehoods presented by the government. Finally, although the Japanese internment orders affected a much larger number of people than the "terror" detentions have done thus far, the WWII internment was limited by the finite duration of the war. In contrast, the present ill-defined "war on terrorism" and the attendant detentions have no foreseeable end."