As the government clamps down on the information it wants the public to know, it expands its information-gathering efforts on the public. Secrecy has its place in times of war, but it is unlikely that the global war on terror will ever have an official end date. So the public should be concerned about how much of the First and Fourth Amendments are being relinquished.

To root out terrorists in our midst, the feds are employing expanded powers in the form of national security letters, the collection of phone records and the pursuit of reporters and their sources. Unchecked, such powers can undermine the freedoms we are fighting to preserve. But because all of these tools fall under the cloak of national security, oversight is impossible unless other branches of government step forward.

When the New York Times revealed the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretaps program, the Bush administration said the full intelligence committees in Congress could not be apprised for fear of leaks. But when it appeared as if the nomination for CIA director would be held up, Gen. Michael Hayden gave the Senate Intelligence Committee an extensive briefing.

To this day, the wiretap program has not been subjected to congressional hearings because the information sought has been deemed classified.

That theme was revisited Tuesday when the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would not investigate whether a federal law was violated when phone companies reportedly turned over call-pattern information to the NSA. The reason? The information sought is classified.

At the same time it is successfully fending off scrutiny, the executive branch is aggressively pursuing government watchdogs. On Sunday, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales raised the possibility of seeking criminal prosecutions against reporters and news organizations that print or broadcast national security information. That would mean the journalists who first told us about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, secret CIA prisons in Europe, the detention of enemy combatants and the various NSA spying programs could be thrown in jail.

This isn’t the first time the nation has been at war. During the Cold War, reporters divulged the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and the U2 flight of Francis Gary Powers. During the Vietnam War, reporters divulged the secret bombings of Cambodia and printed the Pentagon Papers. No journalists went to jail while informing the public of these national security matters.

The FBI recently confirmed an ABC News report that it was using national security letters to collect phone call data on reporters in leak investigations. National security letters, which are like subpoenas without a court’s approval, have long been used to snoop on suspected terrorists and other perceived enemies of the state, but the Patriot Act expanded their scope to include just about anyone. So the FBI is using them to chill media sources.

Democracies provide special challenges to those who are charged with keeping us safe, but that is a necessary trade-off in preserving the freedoms we hold dear. We can never declare victory in the current war if we have to fundamentally change who we are.