Ned Lamont makes the obvious point: Lieberman’s words sound “an awful lot” like something Dick Cheney would — and did — say. “It seemed almost orchestrated,” Lamont tells the Associated Press. “It’s sort of demeaning to the people of Connecticut … I thought the senator and the vice president were both wrong to use that attack (strategy) on the voters of Connecticut.”

Lamont isn’t the only one. As Think Progress notes, even former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge thinks Cheney and, by extension, Lieberman are off the mark in concluding that Lamont’s primary win somehow emboldens the enemy. “That may be the way the vice president sees it,” Ridge says, “but I dont see it that way, and I dont think most Americans see it that way.”

The system’s fear factor has long been the subject of complaints; critics have suspected the Bush administration of manipulating the country’s terror ratings in order to boost its own approval rating (and, as we also noted last week, they were right — according to a Pew Research Center poll, terror warnings did translate into increased support for Republicans in general, and President Bush in particular). A White House statement on the issue, which the Washington Post called “a tepid statement of support,” said the bill could “hinder the department’s ability to implement its various missions.”

If the legislation becomes law (it’s not clear that it will see the same support in the Senate), one of Homeland Security’s missions would certainly change: The department will be less able to take the White House’s cues on when to spook the country. Instead, Homeland Security will be required to craft a replacement warning system that allows individual cities, states, or economic sectors to be put on alert, and includes emergency-specific tips to help citizens protect themselves.

In his new role, Ridge will be the latest and most high-profile RFID evangelist. “It’s clear his experience and expertise in government and Homeland Security … will be a great contribution to our strategies and developments,” says Mark Nelson, a Savi spokesperson.

It was certainly savvy to sign up Ridge to endorse RFID, as the technology has many controversial applications. The Bush administration is in the process of adopting RFID technology as a way to keep track of not just things but also people.

The storm over the technology erupted when libraries adopted it to track books. Privacy advocates argued that it could be abused to monitor patrons and what they read, spawning any number of suspicions about them.

Today, civil libertarians are up in arms over the State Department’s intention to use RFID in U.S. passports, beginning this year. “It is the government and the private sector joining together as usual to create and deploy surveillance technologies,” says Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, sent copious comments to the State Department critiquing the plan to use the technology for passports. “It’s all one big happy family as far as they’re concerned. Unfortunately for everyone else concerned, it is just one great big surveillance industrial complex.”

“It’s mildly entertaining that just as we’re seeing a massive push for RFID and tracking chips in everything, the first Bush appointee to Homeland Security just happens to be involved,” says Bill Scannell, a privacy activist who put up the site RFID Kills.com last week to oppose the use of the technology in passports. “It all goes to the heart of what happens when people get treated like bottles of shampoo getting shunted around the supply chain from warehouse to warehouse. This is the Bush administration’s approach to security. And it doesn’t work. It’s great for shampoo. It’s bad for people.”

The new “electronic passports” will be equipped with a chip capable of transmitting personal information — such as your name, nationality and address — found on standard passports. The State Department contends that the chips will bring a new level of security to American passports, making them easier to process at border crossings and harder to forge. But privacy advocates and civil libertarians argue that it will achieve exactly the opposite result: exposing American citizens to having their personal information read or stolen without their passport ever leaving their hands.

Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a privacy rights group, says: “The reason that I am so concerned about the passport RFID issue is that individuals have no choice in the matter. If they want to travel beyond the borders of the United States they must carry a passport. So, they are going to be forced to carry a tracking technology with them whenever they go.”

The reason RFID is more controversial than, say, a bar code is that the data on the chip is read by a remote reader. The State Department asserts that the tags it will use can be read from only 4 inches away. But privacy advocates say there’s no way the State Department can guarantee that.

As security expert Bruce Schneier writes on his blog: “Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity. Think about what that means for a minute. It means that passport holders are continuously broadcasting their name, nationality, age, address and whatever else is on the RFID chip. It means that anyone with a reader can learn that information, without the passport holder’s knowledge or consent. It means that pickpockets, kidnappers and terrorists can easily — and surreptitiously — pick Americans or nationals of other participating countries out of a crowd.”

There are no plans to encrypt the data on the tags in passports. “This is a dangerous, inappropriate device to be installing in U.S. passports,” says Scannell, who imagines terrorists overseas identifying Americans by their passports when picking targets to bomb. “Which cafe do we lob the grenade into? Ping, ping, ping. There are 21 Americans in there.” The tags could also be used to identify people who walk into an abortion clinic, a mosque or a political meeting.

Tags are being tested in other areas that concern civil liberties advocates. The Department of Homeland Security is experimenting with them as a way to monitor foreign visitors at U.S. border crossings. Electronic tags placed in visas and passports may speed up customs lines and identify suspects on government watch lists. But they could also expose travelers to invasions of privacy. Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature is considering allowing RFID to be placed in cars to ensure that drivers have valid insurance.

RFID has long been used for supply-chain management, both by business and the government. The Department of Defense uses Savi’s technology to manage equipment and supplies in 40-foot-long shipping containers. “Picture hundreds if not thousands of containers in the desert,” explains Savi spokesperson Nelson. “And workers need to find milk or boots or bullets. Rather than opening up each container, they can take a handheld device and scan those mountains of containers and find it.” He adds that the company has had a relationship with the Department of Defense for nearly a decade, though he refuses to disclose what percentage of its business stems from Pentagon.

Savi is not among the companies competing to supply the RFID technology for U.S. passports. Besides, proponents of the technology stress that the implementation of RFID used in the desert to track military equipment has more in common with an EZ-Pass automatic toll crossing than what would be used in passports. Perhaps new hire Ridge, with all of his homeland experience, can help Savi bridge the gap between the battlefield and the border crossing.

But they’ve also got one hell of a “To-Do List” for Bush’s new security chief. For starters, the mammoth agency of 180,000 staffers is, by some accounts, still an organizational disaster zone (“The DHS is far from the nimble, integrated agency it needs to be,” they note.) That’s due at least in part to turf wars causing chaos and inertia inside the agency.

The three recommend that Chertoff begin by “revising” the much-maligned color-coded alert system — which some have taken to calling the “rainbow of doom” — into “something useful.” (They don’t say anything specific about what that might be.) And from emergency response infrastructure to bioterrorism to port security — no news here — they say much remains to be done: “A nuclear weapon hidden inside a shipping container is the gravest danger facing this country  Customs inspectors don’t have the resources or time to search more than a small fraction of the roughly 7 million containers entering the country each year.”

Baer, Ratliff and Heron acknowledge that another terrorist attack on the U.S. may be all but inevitable. “Chertoff must also confront the potential cascade effects of a successful terrorist attack, ” they write. “Beyond the individual city (or port or chemical plant) affected lies the landscape of secondary effects: the shortages of goods and services, the transportation shutdowns and the electrical outages that can spell long-term social and economic disaster.”

For more on what that might look like — why we all better hope Chertoff lives up to the authors’ praise — see this ominous study of disaster scenarios by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke.

Since Ridge raised the national threat alert level, we’re living in a lockdown here: cement “Jersey” barricades with guards, some toting automatic rifles; ubiquitous surveillance, seen and unseen; and random searches, K-9 sniffs and I.D. checks. And thanks to banks of new floodlights, the sun no longer sets on Capitol Hill.

The checkpoints went up in the middle of the night, just in time for Tuesday’s morning rush hour. Many drivers found themselves subject to questioning, searches and I.D. checks. Traffic overflowed onto all the neighborhood streets, as it does every rush hour now. On Thursday, police added checkpoints to streets surrounding the Federal Reserve; the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are under the same high security. Irate D.C. city officials “have assailed what they call an opportunistic encroachment on city streets by security officials taking advantage of terrorism threats,” the Washington Post reported.

It’s an unpleasant thing to do, but just for a second, think like a terrorist. You want to hurt the United States, give Uncle Sam a black eye … again. Maybe you take a few people out in the process, but sending a message is your primary mission: You’re not safe, Americans, not at home or abroad.

So, where would any self-respecting terrorist strike next? In New York and Washington, at the symbolic hubs of our economic, military and political power? Been there, done that. Besides, if post-9/11 security in both cities wasn’t high enough, it is now. But is it high enough to deter the bad guys or catch them in the dragnet? Late Tuesday night, I decided to ride my bicycle around the new perimeter and check it out.

The guards were attentive as I rode along, through and around their barriers. They clearly sized me up as I passed and properly gauged me as no threat, although I was acting suspiciously, sometimes circling back to have a second look. Perhaps they judged that a bike without a lot of bags on it couldn’t carry much trouble. Or maybe stopping bikes just wasn’t in their orders. No one stopped me — until I started taking pictures.

Within moments, a squad car came at me, lights blazing. Two more followed. A firm but polite Capitol Police officer requested identification and asked why I was taking pictures. I told him that as a writer and a neighbor, I wanted to document the event. He called my name and address into his dispatcher. Once the all-clear came back (“There’s no record on your individual,” the radio crackled), he told me why pictures weren’t allowed — I could be a terrorist gathering intelligence. I told him there were no hard feelings; he was doing his job and I was doing mine.

Before he took off, I ventured a guess: “Man, you guys must be flat-out with mandatory overtime.” He rolled his eyes and nodded. “Yeah, it’s really hard on the families,” he said.

At a checkpoint near the U.S. Botanical Garden, at the foot of Capitol Hill, one officer yelled, “No pictures! Hey, no pictures!” But I managed to persuade the sergeant in charge to allow a few. Only after leaving the floodlights’ glare did I notice that in the shadow beyond, a black-clad officer with an automatic rifle had watched me the whole time.

Near the Senate offices I found three tractor-trailers and a loader putting up a new row of cement barriers. I chatted with the drivers, two of them father and son. They were working through the night hauling nine barriers per load from Virginia. “There are 27 loads coming tonight,” a driver said. “Tomorrow night they’re supposed to be bringing in 65 more loads.” That’s a total of 828 new barriers, each about 10 feet long — almost two miles’ worth.

“Do you think this makes us more secure?” I asked. One of the drivers, the son, just shrugged. The father said, “I don’t know what this gets us.”

On Wednesday, I discovered how random and porous the checkpoints can be, despite the best efforts of police. A wholesome, Midwestern-looking young woman was waved through one of them without even having to roll down her window. The Middle Eastern-looking taxi driver behind her got a thorough questioning. So much for heeding Ashcroft’s warning that al-Qaida might be using “European-looking” operatives.

It’s not perfect, but the heightened security is a formidable deterrent. I have great respect for the Capitol Hill police — I’ve always found them calm and professional — and I think they and all the security forces in Washington are doing as well as they can, stretched as they are.

Still, if I were a bad guy, I’d forget D.C. or New York. Instead, I’d join the weekly Saturday-morning pilgrimage to Wal-Mart. Nothing like several bombings at malls across the country to stall the economy and make us all feel more vulnerable. It would be so easy.

And if such a thing were to happen, would the police-state tactics we’re living with here be expanded nationwide? If not, how could we be truly safe? If so, would our liberty survive?

Under the circumstances, perhaps we can understand the extreme security, even tolerate it for a time. But paradoxically, it hasn’t made me feel safer. Instead, it’s a constant reminder of our vulnerability and of the impossibility of barricading and random-searching our way to national security.