THIS HAS been a particularly bad week, a historically bad week, for Americans who believe that government actions should be presumed public and personal behavior should be presumed private.

The war on terrorism seems to have stripped this nation of its capacity for critical thinking when it comes to preserving a balance between civil liberties and security. Americans and their elected "leaders" are shrugging or cowering when they should be challenging the Bush administration's assault on basic freedoms.

Just this week:

-- The Senate approved a Homeland Security Act that gives a green light to the new department to mine a "virtual centralized grand database" on every American. The idea of the "Total Information Awareness" campaign is to draw from government and commercial records -- everything from your magazine subscriptions and credit-card purchases to your college transcripts and divorce papers -- to establish individual dossiers. The concept (cooked up by John Poindexter, a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) is to not wait until an American is suspected of terrorism, or any wrongdoing for that matter, to compile this information. The idea is to have a file that tracks the life of everyone -- including you.

-- While average Americans will be getting more scrutiny under this bill, the government will be subject to less. The Homeland Security Act, rushed through the Senate this week at the urging of the White House, broadly exempts many activities of this vast new department from the Freedom of Information Act. The rationale was to encourage private companies to cooperate with the agency without fear of exposing corporate secrets. But the result could be that a superagency of 170,000 employees -- with unprecedented powers to affect Americans' lives -- will be largely shielded from public scrutiny.

-- The top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review this week gave the federal government sweeping new authority to listen to telephone conversations, read e-mail and search private property of Americans who have not necessarily been suspected of terrorism. The ruling by the three-judge panel effectively blurs the distinction between spying on suspected terrorists and foreign agents and eavesdropping in domestic criminal cases.

-- The Wall Street Journal this week described how the FBI's "Project Lookout" had distributed hastily assembled "watch lists" of possible terrorist associates that left innocent Americans subject to harassment and discrimination. Some companies have even fed these error-filled lists into their databases to help screen job applicants and customers. People who were wrongly included on the lists -- whether by typographical error or by merely having the last name of Atta -- are finding it nearly impossible to clear their names now that the lists have been widely duplicated and circulated.

It is important for Americans to keep two points in perspective as they contemplate the erosion of civil liberties that is occurring in the name of counterterrorism. First, the plotting of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not escape detection from the intelligence systems that were available and legal at the time. The failure came in processing the information -- such as a Phoenix FBI agent's suspicions about a local flight school -- in a timely manner.

Also, Americans must never forget the excesses that can occur when authorities are allowed to run roughshod over individual rights under the pretext of "national security," such as with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II or the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's domestic spying on political "enemies" in an era of far less intrusive technology than will be available to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The struggle for civil liberties is lost only if Americans are willing to concede. When Congress returns in January, House and Senate leaders have agreed to reassess some of the controversial goodies in the Homeland Security Act, such as the targeting of a research center at Texas A&M University (engineered by House GOP Whip Tom DeLay) and the allowing of federal contracts to companies that have moved offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.

The least our elected officials can do is revisit the portions of the act that amount to a one-way window, a wrong-way window, between a government and its citizenry.