Those of us who have been warning of an impending totalitarian state can be laughingly dismissed no longer. It is now crucial to look behind the curtain of blind trust in official policy.

We must know what our leaders stand for, now that we have indisputable proof that we are being spied on by our Congress and president under the secret PRISM program.

Under guise of the war on terror, our leaders convinced us that no price is too big to pay for our security. But Ben Franklin warned us that if we exchanged our liberty for security we deserved neither. We have failed our Founding Fathers, but we can still save this country from becoming a PRISM aka “prison” state.

To do so, we will have to wage a moral fight against the encroaching grip of the “securitats” — those officials who would destroy our liberty for their power and profit. We must look past their false promise of security, and realize that only vigilance against those who would deprive us of our system of checks and balances is a safe course of action.

Laurie Dobson is a resident of Kennebunkport.