Checkpoint America

Border Patrol checkpoints deep in the interior of the United States raise the specter of Soviet-style surveillance, and may be intended merely to habituate the public to such police intrusions.
By William Marvel

At twelve or thirteen I read an abridged version of Lés Miserables, which gave me my earliest impressions of Napoleonic France. Of all the brutality in that novel, I was most disturbed by the discovery that citizens of that nation and era had to carry passports just to travel between cities or provinces. For a boy who had, on several occasions, already traversed fifteen states with his parents, without benefit of passports or interference by authorities, the restrictions placed on the movement of nineteenth-century Frenchmen somehow seemed even more oppressive than the Draconian justice system.