From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This program changed a lot after 9-11.

Before, we spent a lot of time on cultural issues.

After, our focus shifted to freedom of expression and information, privacy in the First Amendment.

And that's where we'll begin this anniversary show.

Civil liberties, those freedoms I just mentioned, are conditions that enable good journalism.

And they were threatened by our own government after the attacks, as they always are when national security is at risk.

University of Chicago law professor Jeff Stone is the author of Perilist Times,

free speech in wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism.

We asked him to assess the nation's record on civil liberties in the decade following the attacks.

And he says it wasn't quite as bad as we may have feared.

Nobody was prosecuted for criticizing the government of the war.

There were no mass arrest or detentions of American citizens.

We were a bit fast and loose, I think, with aliens from some countries

who we saw as potential threats, and that was a mistake. But unlike World War II,

where we incarcerated almost 100,000 American citizens of Japanese descent, nobody was talking

about incarcerating American Muslims. One of the things that

George Bush did was recognizing, for example, that he could not suppress critics was to be very

aggressive about preventing people from learning what the government was doing because you can't

criticize what you don't know. And that's very dangerous for democracy for the government to be

secretly engaging in a range of activities that would be dangerous for democracy for the government to be secretly engaging in a

range of activities that would be criticized by members of the American electorate is a denial

...