When you live in a country founded on fundamental principles of freedom, individuality and privacy, and those rights begin disappearing, unusual things begin to happen. Perhaps none so unusual as a forum in Washington last month, where the left and right wings came together to discuss prominent legislation in the nation's war on terrorism.

The topic: government responses to Sept. 11 that go beyond fighting terrorism and infringe on the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. Rarely, if ever, do groups as far apart on the ideological spectrum as the American Civil Liberties Union and Eagle Forum come down on the same side of an issue. But apparently, when it comes to preserving those core American ideals, there is rare common ground to be found.

The overwhelming consensus of the group was that in 1890, when a young lawyer named Louis Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, first laid out the case for a constitutional right to privacy, they just might have stumbled onto something.

For once, the right and left wings agreed: What Brandeis and Warren termed the "right to be left alone," the "most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by all civilized men," apparently remains indispensable -- especially in the post-Sept. 11 world -- and recent government surveillance and law enforcement measures that run counter to it require quick reform and teamwork.

Panelists singled out the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program and the proposed draft legislation, commonly known as Patriot II, as especially troubling.

Total Information Awareness approaches counterterrorism efforts from a flawed direction. It would, by its developers' own admission, collect and analyze vast amounts of detailed personal information about everyday Americans in the elusive hope of discerning undefined terrorist threat patterns.

Simply put, TIA would look at every Americans' past addresses, personal medical records, bank dealings, travel itineraries, mental health histories, credit card purchases and other so-called "transactional" data, in the untested expectation that, by spying without limit on the good guys, they'll spot the bad guys. Even though some optimists on the Hill think TIA is dead, trust us, it's not.

Now we have Patriot II (aka "Son of Patriot") proposed by the Bush administration, a proposal that is a quantum leap beyond its forebear. Patriot II approaches law enforcement and intelligence-gathering in much the same way -- going light years beyond what is reasonably necessary in the fight against terrorism.

Provisions in the draft bill would allow secret arrests, warrantless searches, broad asset forfeiture with limited judicial oversight and the stripping of citizenship from Americans who provide support to groups designated as terrorist organizations, even if they are unaware of the group's activities.

Meanwhile, laws are already on the books -- as part of the first Patriot Act -- that allow the government to visit our local libraries and bookstores to examine our reading habits.

As law enforcement or intelligence-gathering techniques go, these would be like trying to catch shrimp with a tuna net. Can't be done -- the holes are too big.

Terrorists will always be able to fool tools based on broad spy-on-everyone approaches rather than solid threat intelligence, making such tools fundamentally ineffectual and, worse, potential catalysts for a dangerously false sense of security.

The practical and constitutional problems with Total Information Awareness and Patriot II underscore the importance of protecting the right to privacy in America.

By weeding out those anti-terrorism measures that unduly intrude on Americans' privacy rights, we would actually be fortifying our counterterrorism strategy by re-emphasizing the importance of better foreign intelligence-gathering and analytical capabilities relative to increased surveillance powers, which are already extremely broad.

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights provide all the guidance required to keep America a land of unparalleled domestic security and individual liberty. It just might be worth rereading them to remind us of that, except for fear the government might find out we're reading up on just what our "unalienable rights" are.