"Just seven years after the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, Congress enacted the Sedition Act making it a crime to bring “into contempt or disrepute” the government, either House of Congress or the president, “or to excite against them...the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Passed to defend America against the imagined threat of Jacobean terror and the guillotine, its true purpose was to suppress support for Thomas Jefferson in the run-up to the election of 1800. Trials presided over by Supreme Court justices ended with criminal sentences. One victim was a congressman. James Madison, often considered the father of the constitution, presciently wrote: “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” Hundreds were prosecuted for criticising American participation in the first world war. After the second world war, left-wingers were jailed for conspiring to teach or advocate communism. More recently, in December 2001, the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, testified before the Senate that those who scare “peace-loving” Americans with “phantoms of lost liberty” were only aiding terrorists. When the New York Times disclosed in 2005 that the president had, without a warrant, secretly ordered the wiretapping of Americans' international telephone calls (in violation of a criminal statute), the newspaper's journalists were threatened with prosecution for espionage."