(Peter Sagal) Travel around America, and you're bound to run into the Constitution.

It seems to be everywhere.

(Sarah Palin) The Constitution... (Barak Obama) Our Constitution... (Rachel Maddow) The Constitution... (Pat Buchanan) You haven't read the Constitution...

This little document-- it means everything to us.

It's like the Big Bang.

It's the most momentous thing to happen in the modern world.

(Peter) The Constitution has been around for more than 225 years.

But many of us don't have any idea what it says.

Of course, that's never stopped us from arguing about what it means.

I'm Peter Sagal, and I am taking a journey across the country to find out how the Constitution works in the 21st century.

(woman) We're blessed with freedom.

We get to say whatever we want.

But we just can't do it in secret.

There is no secret-- it's an illusion.

(Peter) Ask anybody on the street about the meaning of the Constitution about the meaning of America itself, and they'll give you a one-word answer-- freedom.

A guy once told me this is a free country.

A free country!

...free country Goddammit, this is a free country!

(Peter) But take a look at the Constitution.

There are about 4500 words in it, and "freedom" is not one of them.

The delegates learned very quickly that they'd made a mistake.

(Peter) It would take the first ten amendments to the Constitution to fix that little omission.

But exactly what freedoms were guaranteed back then?

And how free are we really today?

The majority rules... or it should.

(Peter) One person's right can seem to another person like a great wrong.

I feel like the Constitution failed me.

I am so tweeting this right now.

(Peter) And as the digital age changes how we live, can our rights keep up?

Cracks are showing in the Bill of Rights and I think technology is putting them there.

(Peter) This is the land of the free-- that seems simple.

Then why are our rights so complicated?

[guitar, drums, bass, &piano play in bright rhythm] [motorcycle motor purrs] A guy on a motorcycle-- it's like freedom personified.

Right?

Five guys on five motorcycles-- five times more freedom.

It's a freedom fiesta!

But freedom to do what, exactly?

My friends here are the Arizona Leatherneck's Motorcycle Club.

They're all ex Marines, even though they will tell you there's no such thing as an "ex"Marine.

(man) The other night I had some guy walk up to me and say, "I wanna yank on your goatee."

[laughter] I just looked at him and said, "You can try it."

Then his friend grabbed him and was like... (Peter) People are actually dumb enough to get in your guys' faces?

(man) Oh yeah.

All the time.

You'd be surprised.

How often does that happen?

Bar fights?Bar fights.

[all laugh] (Peter) You guys are all Marines.

When we talk about defending your country, is there some sort of ideal of America; a Constitutional ideal?

It's all of the above.

It's so we can keep our rights and liberties.

A lot of people don't realize the Bill of Rights weren't put in there to protect me from him or from you or anybody else, they were put in there to protect the individual citizen from the government.

This is who we are.

This right here.

(Peter) You have a copy of the Constitution in your pocket You carry it with you at all times.

Why?Yes.

Because I believe in what it says, and there are so many people out there that go well, the Constitution, says this.

Oh really?

Where does it say that at?

I love this-- you're getting in bar fights and Constitutional arguments.

One can be a preamble to the other!

[all laugh] We are free.

We are a free society.

We should be able to make these choices ourselves.

If I choose not to wear a helmet and I get killed... bad on me.

What's the next thing that they're gonna do?

Are they gonna make you put a leash on your kid?

It's great, you guys are hardcore.

I didn't go spend two years in the Middle East away from my family, away from my friends, spend Christmases, everything else over there to come back to a limited country?

No, I did that to come back to a free country.

[engines rev up] [rock music plays] ♪ ♪ (Peter) So for these guys, your rights are absolute, including the right to get into a lot of trouble if you are so inclined.

That's what they fought for.

And the Constitution is there to guarantee and protect those rights.

And to keep anyone, especially the government from taking them away.

But what specific rights are covered by the Constitution?

And how did those guarantees get there in the first place?

Historian Rick Beeman knows something about this.

We're discussing essential human rights the way the founding fathers would have done it-- over a beer at Philadelphia's City Tavern.

So this is City Tavern; this is very nice.

Cheers.

Oh yeah, that really, that puts me in the mind to... And I think it probably put them in a much better frame of mind.

They'd spent, you know, from 10:00 in the morning till 3:30 or 4:00 in the statehouse.

Then they came over here and relaxed, but they also kept talking.

So among the things they didn't include, despite all the conviviality, was a Bill of Rights in the original Constitution.

Why didn't they?

It seems kind of natural.

They had lots of excuses.

The states already had their bills of rights, so it would be redundant.

What if we leave out a few key rights?

That would be dangerous But the real reason, I think, is, they wanted to go home.

They thought it might take another couple of months.

So you're saying that the reason that we don't have, or we didn't have a bill of rights in the original Constitution was that everyone was tired and grumpy and wanted to go home?

Well, I honestly, Peter, I think that's the main reason.

And once the Constitution went out to the public for ratification, they learned very quickly that they'd made a mistake.

(Peter) After the delegates signed the draft Constitution, it had to go out to the 13 states for ratification.

But when the states started looking at it, there was a whole new round of debates with meetings and speeches and newspaper articles, arguing pro and con, back and forth.

Good patriots, like Patrick Henry of Virginia-- that's the guy who said, "Give me liberty or give me death"-- were afraid that the new Constitution, with its strong central government, would lead to the death of liberty.

What was missing was a Bill of Rights to protect individual freedom.

But here was the deal: the document couldn't be changed or amended by any state.

They had to vote up or down, yea or nay, to approve the whole thing and make the Constitution the law of the land.

There are all these states that said okay, we'd be willing to do this if there were a bill of rights.

And the pro-Constitution forces said okay, as soon as you give us a Congress, the first thing we'll do is, we'll give you a bill of rights.

Is that more or less right?

Most of the pro-Constitution folks said that.

So the ratification was a popular vote in each state?

It was as popular a vote as had ever occurred anywhere in the world.

That didn't mean that women could vote or slaves could vote, but literally, all free adult males in most states, black or whiteReally?

could vote.

It didn't matter whether you owned property.

This really was a vote among "We the People."

How did the specific rights that we now think of as the Bill of Rights-- how were they conceived, where did they come from?

So the Constitution is finally ratified.

And really all of the liberties come out of British encroachments on American liberties during the decade or more leading up to the Revolution.

(Peter) And there they are... the Bill of Rights.

All ten amendments are framed as limits on the central government.

They're nearly all written in negative terms.

"Congress shall make no law..." Congress shall not..." Instead of making promises, we set boundaries.

Right at the start, the First Amendment includes the big three freedoms: freedom of religion, speech, and the press.

Next comes the second, with its well-regulated militia, or the right to keep and bear arms, depending on how you feel about that one.

The Third Amendment is entirely devoted to protecting you from having government troops take up residence in your home.

Can you imagine having redcoats coming in raiding the refrigerator at 3:00 in the morning?

The Fourth Amendment secures our freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

The fifth protects you from being tried twice for the same charge or from being forced to testify against yourself.

That's the familiar "right to remain silent" the one that we invoke when we "take the fifth."

The Sixth Amendment ensures a fair trial in criminal cases-- "speedy and public" and with a lawyer.

The seventh guarantees a jury trial in many civil cases.

The Eighth Amendment protects against "cruel and unusual"punishment.

Of course, what's "cruel" and what's "unusual" is left to the courts to decide.

Flogging?No.

Death?Maybe.

Educational TV?

Depends on the show!

Some people worry that the importance of a list is as much what's not on it as what is on it.

So the Ninth Amendment declares that just because certain rights are listed here, it doesn't mean that there are no others.

And the Tenth Amendment says that the powers not specifically given to the government in the Constitution are reserved to the states and the people.

To the founding generation of Americans, the greatest threat to individual liberty was the government they were creating, so even as they created it, they limited its powers.

(Akhil Amar) The language of our Bill or rights... (Peter) The Bill of Rights can tell us a lot about the mind-set of the framers, and a lot about ourselves as a nation.

Akhil Amar has given that a lot of thought.

Are we a free country?

Proverbially yes, and I think actually, yes.

Your slight pause there was of some concern to me.

Sometimes with you, there's a little trick there.

Most Americans would say yes!

Yes!

Or they'd say no!

But you had to think.

I think we have a ton of freedom, yes, and some might say too much freedom.

It seems these days that the Bill of Rights is more important in popular imagination than the body of the Constitution itself.

When did people start investing the Bill of Rights with so much importance?

I think early on, precisely because it's written for ordinary people.

It doesn't just come from a closed meeting at Philadelphia.

It comes from 13 very open state conventions, open to the world, over a whole year, people talking about the thing, so it comes from the bottom.

It's written in a way that's very easy to understand, very easy to sort of memorize, and so it becomes part of a culture.

It's this epic conversation that electrified the world.

[motor purrs] (Peter) The language of the Bill of Rights seems very plain.

But that hasn't stopped us from arguing about it.

Some of the arguments have been bitter and the issues painful.

But those arguments have sometimes led to the most important assertions of our rights.

(all) ♪God hates America♪ (Peter) These people are members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

It's a small, fringe religious group from Topeka, Kansas.

They call this free speech, but anybody's faith in the freedom to speak one's mind will be tested when they hear these guys.

Hey, what the heck is wrong with you?"

(Peter) For the past decade, the Westboro Baptists have staged their protests at the funerals of American military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They don't claim that the fallen soldiers themselves are gay.

They believe the deaths of our servicemen and women are divine punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality.

And they are not polite about it.

I pray to the dear Lord to please kill more of those guys.

They don't seem to have gotten the message.

(Peter) In March 2006, in Westminster, Maryland, the Westboro Baptists picketed at the funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, who had just been killed in Iraq.

Corporal Snyder's father, Albert Snyder, sued Westboro for defamation of character, and for inflicting emotional distress on him and his grieving family.

The case reached the Supreme Court, where in an 8-to-1 vote, the justices ruled in favor of the Westboro Baptists.

Although it didn't have the outcome that I wanted, hey, I fought the good fight.

Thank you.

(Albert Snyder) This shot is the one, probably I'm most proud of because he loved kids.

[with emotion] This was taken about a week before he was killed.

He used to send me letters, and that's how he would address them, he'd just address them "Dad."

You were there for the arguments in the Supreme Court?

Yes.

That was an 8-to-1 decision.

Tell me why they're wrong.

I think everybody deserves to be buried in peace.

I don't care who you are.

What about my rights to privacy?

What about my rights, you know, to mourn and grieve in my way?

My son died for the Constitution.

But I can't believe that our forefathers meant something like this to be free speech.

What I'm thinking of is where to draw the line.

Cause obviously, you'd agree that if I express an opinion about anything it could hurt somebody, I don't see it as a line, but I see it as a case-by-case situation.

You have to use common sense.

I mean, if we can do or say anything to anyone, anywhere, anytime, what kind of civilization are we going to be living in?

Aren't we making our freedom of speech subjective if we allow the level of hurt experienced by another person to determine your rights to speak?

You come back, and you tell me that when it happens to your child.

Okay,I hope I never have to do that.

I hope you don't.

And I hope nobody has to do it.

[people yelling] (Peter) In our country there's always been tension between an abstract right to free speech and how much we hate what somebody is actually saying.

Susan Fluke says that she must be paid to have sex.

What does that make her?

It makes her a slut, right?

(Peter) Our country's tolerance for unpopular ideas has been tested, over and over.

During World War I, Americans were swept up in a patriotic fervor, and Congress made it a crime to interfere with the war effort, and banned disloyal language about the government, the flag, or the Armed Forces.

When the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs spoke out against the draft, he was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In the 1950s, people like Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin stirred up a red scare.

(McCarthy) Even if there's only one Communist in the State Department, that would still be one Communist too many.

(Peter) And when Communists spoke their political views out loud, they risked being arrested, or deported.

But things were slowly changing.

More Americans began to recognize that freedom was a big part of what made us different from our totalitarian enemies.

And in case after case, the Supreme Court upheld the right to free speech, even if most people considered that speech to be offensive.

The Ku Klux Klan was allowed to express its racist views.

American Nazis won the right to march through a mostly Jewish neighborhood.

And American flags could even be burned as an act of political protest.

In case after case, the Supreme Court upheld the freedom of all Americans to speak their minds-- even if their views are controversial.

And it supported the freedom of the press to publish almost anything-- even if the government doesn't like it.

Given this trend, the ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptists should come as no surprise.

As Justice Brandeis wrote way back in the 1920s, when we're confronted with speech we don't agree with, "The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

It seems like the courts are more and more willing to give freedom the benefit of the doubt, and treat our First Amendment guarantees literally.

Eugene Volokh is a law professor who exercises that right on a daily basis, on his popular blog called The Volokh Conspiracy.

So this is America and I have an absolute right to free speech.

Right?

You have a right to free speech that's quite broad, Quite broad, but not absolute.

Lots of things you can say, bunch of things you can't.

I want to try to make this concrete.

That's a theater, it's a big theater, and let's imagine that it was filled with people.

I know I can't run in in the middle of a performance and yell, "fire"-- that's not protected.

Falsely shouting fire is not protected.

If there really is a fire, you can tell them it's a fire.

How about if I run in and yell "this movie sucks."

The First Amendment protects opinion, and yet when the government is trying to restrict speech because of what you're saying, 'cause it doesn't like the message that's when the protections most kick in.

Are there places you think in our current understanding where we've gone too far, for example, the Supreme Court has recently said that money is in effect speech.

Do you agree with that?

What the Supreme Court said is that restricting people's ability to spend money in order to speak is a restriction on speech.

Whether you're an individual or whether you're a newspaper or whether you are a corporation or whether you're a trade union that is a restriction of the ability to speak.

And on that I think the Supreme Court was quite correct.

Now, you were born in the Soviet Union, and one of the interesting things we found out is that the Soviet Union had a bill of rights, which everybody ignored.

Here in America, it works-- more or less-- but man, it works.

Why?

Throughout American history, has been a combination of a culture that cares about liberty and democracy, and a structure that is conducive to liberty and democracy.

The provisions for democracy and for elections in the Constitution wouldn't mean much if you weren't free to argue.

Democracy is hard to have happen without freedom of speech.

(Peter) So that's democracy in action.

When the Supreme Court upheld the free speech rights of the Westboro Baptists, they were protecting speech almost no one could agree with.

But the justices also said that the privacy of a grieving family could be protected.

Local and state governments could make rules limiting how close protesters could get to a military funeral, and when they could show up.

I want to thank everybody who... (Peter) In August 2012, Congress passed a federal bill to apply similar rules to all military funerals.

We defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor and respect.

About a month ago I got a letter from President Obama telling me that he was thinking about me when he signed the bill.

(Peter) Since your case, and probably because of your case, the Westboro Baptists, they're now, I think I can say, among the most hated and reviled people in the country.

But now, when they show up there are counterprotesters, there are phalanxes and motorcycle guys and veterans and soldiers to shield the mourners from these people, (Albert) Correct.

(Peter) Then, in that case, can you argue that you won?

I did win.

I did win!

It seems to me, hearing you tell these stories that a great evil was done to you, but an even greater good...

Came out of it.

came out of it and was called forth for you, on behalf of you and your son.

[with much emotion] This was the last fight for Matt.

[motor purrs] (Peter) So even though the right to free speech is not absolute, and even though it can make people miserable or angry, we've decided as a nation that democracy benefits when speech is protected.

And as Gene Volokh says, without free speech we wouldn't have much of a democracy.

(Peter) The Bill of Rights protects your liberties, no matter who you are or how much people dislike you.

And that includes suspected criminals, or even people convicted of crimes, people who end up in a place like this.

This is the old Tennessee State Penitentiary.

It was built by prisoners in 1898 and closed just 20 years ago.

It's empty now, of course, but you can still feel it, what it was like.

(Peter) Interestingly enough, half of the amendments in the Bill of Rights are designed to protect people accused of crimes.

But even though those rights are enshrined in the Constitution itself, they're not guaranteed until we fight for them and win them in the courts.

A case in point-- the Sixth Amendment, which ensures you the right to have a lawyer in a criminal case.

Until quite recently, many defendants, even those facing long prison terms, didn't have a lawyer if they couldn't afford to hire one.

(man) The next case on the docket is the case of the state of Florida, plaintiff, versus Clarence Earl Gideon, defendant.

(Peter) That's what happened back in 1961 to Clarence Gideon, a poor drifter with an eighth-grade education.

(man) What say the defendant, are you ready to go to trial?

Your Honor, I'm not ready for trail.

(Peter) That's Clarence Gideon himself, filmed for a documentary a few years after his trial.

Gideon was charged with breaking into a pool hall in Florida, stealing some beer and wine, and taking coins from vending machines, maybe $50 worth.

He maintained his innocence, but since he didn't have any money to hire an attorney, he asked the court to appoint one for him.

I thought that was actually a law.

I thought that was a constitutional right, and I didn't know no different.

(Peter) The judge turned him down, because under Florida law, public defenders were only appointed in capital cases.

So Gideon represented himself, and he lost.

He was sentenced to five years in state prison, but he didn't give up.

Writing in pencil, on prison stationery, Gideon drafted an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He claimed that he had been deprived of a fair trial because he didn't have a lawyer, and the Supreme Court agreed with him.

Gideon was given a new trial, and a court-appointed attorney.

And this time it took the jury just one hour to acquit him.

Since that landmark decision, anyone who is arrested, charged, and facing prison time, is assured of having a lawyer-- whether they're rich or poor, innocent or guilty.

And even if it hasn't happened to you, you've seen it happen a hundred times.

Freeze!

Get him!

Go, go!

You have the right to an attorney.

I'm informing you right now that you have the right to an attorney.

I was supposed to have a lawyer.

I want someone to help me!

I want a lawyer!

A lawyer will be provided for you at no cost.

(Peter) In real life, that lawyer might be MiAngel Cody.

She walked away from a job at a high-powered law firm to represent poor defendants in federal court in Chicago.

She's made it her mission to make sure they get the fair trial to which they are entitled by the Constitution.

(MiAngel) Even people who've never been in trouble before or who've been in trouble a lot they are nervous when they walk into this courtroom.

(Peter) Oh, I'm a little nervous.

and we're just here to talk.

It's a little imposing.

For a lot of people, they're not lawyers, so they don't know even the language that's being spoken in this room.

So a lot of what I have to do is translate legal speak to the person who I'm standing next to and explain to them, these are your rights.

(Peter) You don't get to pick your clients, right?

I get whoever comes in on the day I'm on call-- it's like being in an emergency room.

Have you ever seen "Grey's Anatomy"or something like that?

I have, yes.

Right.

So my job is like being an emergency room lawyer.

If you walk in for a meeting with your client and the first thing the client says to you is, "Whoa, I did it."

Do you have any obligations once a client tells you that they're guilty?

Do you have, can you like, not mount a defense of innocence?

We as a society believe that even guilty people have certain rights that should not be compromised.

Doesn't that mean that every now and then, because of that some very guilty person, perhaps of some terrible thing, is gonna go free?

That is exactly what it means.

And that is exactly the principle that we, as a society under the Constitution, have decided to weigh more heavily than the interest in locking this person up or punishing this person .

(Peter) In the aftermath of Gideon, there were other landmark decisions protecting the rights of the accused.

The Supreme Court extended the Sixth Amendment protection by ruling that a suspect had to have an attorney present during interrogation.

And it revisited the Fourth Amendment, saying that physical evidence gathered without a legal warrant can't be used in court.

Most famous of all was the Miranda case.

The court took a fresh look at the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

That decision gave birth to the familiar Miranda warning.

"You have the right to remain silent, " If you give up the right to remain silent...

Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.

(Peter) In this country, rights are so important that everybody, especially the government, is obliged to respect them.

Only, our rights sometimes come at a cost.

There's an old saying-- "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of somebody else's nose."

But it's not always clear where your fist ends, and the other person's nose begins.

In Rhode Island, a battle over rights left a town divided.

And in its wake, it left behind a mysterious artifact, hidden away in a basement, in an undisclosed location.

(Peter) Oh my gosh, there it is.

(man) That's it.

And, ah, now David, you haven't seen this since, right?

Not since it came down.

(Peter) Behind that plywood is a prayer.

It was painted right on the plaster, on the wall of a public high school auditorium.

(Peter) Fifty years, or thereabouts, after you wrote this prayer, and it gets put up on the wall nobody says, as far as you know, a peep about it.

Right?

That's right, there was no controversy that I know of in all of that time.

So what did you feel about-- how did you feel when you first heard this story on talk radio that there was a movement to take it down?

(man) At Cranston West High School, this prayer banner has hung in the auditorium for 50 years, until now.

[school bell rings] (Peter) That school prayer dated back to the opening of the school building in the early 1960s.

Thousands of students came and went to Cranston West without saying anything about it-- at least out loud.

It was just a normal school day for me and it... (Peter) Until Jessica Ahlquist walked into this auditorium as a freshman.

She is an atheist, and she was shocked to see a prayer on the wall of her public school.

Okay, and describe it, 'cause it's not there anymore.

No.

[laughs]I wonder why.

What was it?

What did it look like?

What would you see when you looked up?

It was big, it was about 5 feet off the ground and, um, it said "School Prayer" along the top, it addressed "Our Heavenly Father" and it ended with "Amen."

It upset me that my school, that my city, wasn't following the law, wasn't respecting, you know, separation of church and state.

You have a choice to become the plaintiff in the lawsuit against the school to remove the banner.

And even though you knew that it's not a particularly pleasant thing, you decided to do it.

Yes.

Why?

It really made it feel like my school was not going to accept me if I said I was an atheist.

So what did you do?

(Jessica) At the first meeting, I tried to present my argument without bringing religion into it, but somebody said that this was a Christian nation and if you don't like it, you can just deal with it.

So I stood up again to speak.

This isn't about religion anymore.

This is about the Constitution, and it always has been.

Those of you who are bringing religion into this need to stop.

And, you know, that was just-- that was it.

[all chant] (Peter) So then what happened?

I actually won the lawsuit.

I think that's probably when the most backlash happened.

(woman) A standoff over religion in a New England school getting so heated tonight, police were called in.

[chanting] Appeal.

Appeal!

The issue for me was not really about religion; it was about the Constitution, and it was about trying to do what I, you know, what I interpreted the Constitution to be saying about religious freedom.

Was it all worth it?

I'm proud of what I did, and I think it was the right thing.

I don't have any regrets about what happened.

(Peter) The battle in Cranston, Rhode Island, revolved around what Thomas Jefferson once referred to as the "wall of separation" between church and state.

As far as Jessica was concerned, her case repaired two walls-- the one in her school auditorium and Jefferson's wall.

To her, it just seemed obvious, but it may not be quite so simple.

Is the wall between church and state real?

It is real, but it's often misunderstood.

Sometimes people will say the wall of separation means that religion should be kept out of public life, should be kept out of civil society.

That's the wrong way to understand it.

Church/state separation is not a way of kicking religion out of the public square, it's a way to create space for religion in public life.

But where is that line?

For example, there was this banner in a high school in Cranston, Rhode Island that ain't there anymore.

I think Jessica makes a good point, especially in the context of public schools, because the school is a special kind of enterprise.

Because schools are engaged in the formation of citizens, we do want to make sure that we don't put the government in the position of putting a thumb on the scale in favor of one religious group or another or in favor of religion against non-religion.

At the same time, I do think it's a mistake and it's a misunderstanding of separation to think that we have to sort of scrub clean all religion from out of the public square.

Again, finding the right balance is the challenge.

(Peter) At the heart of the issue are 16 words in the First Amendment.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

This much we can all agree on: The government can't establish a state church like the Church of England.

And it can't prevent people from worshipping as they see fit.

Think of that as the first two rows of bricks in Jefferson's wall of separation.

But that wall wasn't very high, at least not at first.

George Washington set a precedent that's lasted two centuries, by taking his oath of office with his hand on a Bible, and allegedly he ad-libbing the words "So help me God"at the end.

From the time public schools began, prayer and Bible readings were a standard part of the curriculum.

I shall read Psalm 111: "Praise the lord, " (Peter) As the Cold War heated up, religion was enlisted in the struggle against what was called "godless communism."

President Eisenhower signed a law formally adopting "In God We Trust"as our nation's motto.

and a reference to the Almighty was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance.

"One nation under God, " (Peter) Then, in the 1960s, the Supreme Court ruled that official prayers and Bible readings in public schools amounted to an establishment of religion, and that was unconstitutional.

The wall of separation was now a little bit higher.

But that didn't end the debate.

Let us pray.

(Peter) Four decades later, the role of religion in public life continues to be a hot-button political issue.

But its presence in the public square cannot be denied.

God bless >>God bless you >>God bless you all.

>>God is with us.

God bless the United States of America.

(Peter) The skirmish in Cranston is just the latest chapter.

What do you say to the kids like Jessica Ahlquist, who say look I'm not religious, I don't believe in that, why should I attend a school that promulgates this message?

I said to her at one of the original hearings, if you don't believe in the prayer, if you don't like the prayer, then don't look at the prayer.

Look at a blank wall.

(Peter) Really?

Yeah, and now there is a blank wall.

And as to her beliefs?

Non belief.

As to that, what do you have to say?

I say, fine, you're entitled to it, but don't take mine from me.

Even though, say, 95% of the students going through, maybe more, would agree with you, had no problem with the prayer, were religious themselves, or had no problem with it, that the role of the Constitution as represented by the courts in this case was to protect that 5%.

No, I can't, I can't, I couldn't care less about the 5%.

Really?

Absolutely.Why not?

Because they're in the minority.

The majority rules-- or it should.

[engine purrs] (Peter) History has shown that the rights of the minority do matter, even if they hold unpopular opinions.

And the Bill of Rights is designed to protect individuals from the government and to prevent a tyranny of the majority.

But sometimes the courts rule in favor of the majority, and the individual loses out.

A few years ago, some residents of the town of New London, Connecticut were stunned when the city informed them it was taking their homes, through the process known as "eminent domain."

Like it or not, they'd have to accept the city's chosen price for their houses and get out.

Right here there used to be about 30 homes.

This weed-choked field, this vacant lot, This vacant lot, right here.

This is where your parents' home was?

Exactly.

These were all well-kept backyards, pull right into the driveway and, you know, right off the bat we had my father's wonderful plants and on March 3rd of 2006 they came with a bulldozer.

They tore the two houses that were here, and then they took the bulldozer, swung it right over, I jumped out, came into the driveway, and stopped 'em.

You stopped them.

I stopped 'em, I said, "You need to move these plants before you touch one thing on this house."

And they said, "We have a demolition order; we're tearing it down."

(Peter) Government orders people out of their homes and bulldozes them?

Surely this can't happen here, not without a good reason.

And the city insisted it did have a good reason.

In fact, it was armed with the Bill of Rights.

At the end of the Fifth Amendment, the text says: ..."nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

And even though it's there to protect property owners from government seizure, it also allows the government to take your property as long as they pay you for it, and as long as it's needed for "public use:" to build a school, or make way for a railroad.

But in this case, the "public" part wasn't so obvious.

The city of New London wanted to turn the property over to a private development corporation, to build a hotel, a fitness club, condos.

New London argued that the whole city would benefit.

The residents fought back, and the case, known as Kelo vs. the City of New London, ended up in the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled against the homeowners.

(Mike) There was just nothing I could do besides being hauled off, and I couldn't see what good that was gonna do.

I had to go home that night and tell my dad his property was destroyed.

How'd he take it?

[scoffs] [with emotion] He cried.

He cried.

How could those justices in black robes steal our property rights from us?

I-I feel like the Constitution failed me.

(Peter) Did the Constitution fail Mike and his neighbors?

The Fifth Amendment is supposed to protect property rights.

The problem is with how the clause is interpreted.

New London was able to interpret "public use"very broadly, and the Supreme Court backed them up.

Oh, and by the way, the hotel and condos and fitness club in New London?

Never built!

So it's hard to say that the city really won anything.

[motor purrs] What happened in New London was far from unique.

In recent years, there have been thousands of cases of state and local governments seizing property in the name of economic development.

And that sparked a nationwide backlash, forcing legislatures to reign in the use of eminent domain.

The Bill of Rights is ink on parchment, but it's not exactly etched in stone.

Over the years, the rights guaranteed by those faint scratches have expanded and been reinterpreted in response to changing circumstances.

In fact the implications of one of those amendments, the second, is still far from settled.

It wasn't until 2010 that the Supreme Court finally decided that the Second Amendment protected Americans' individual right to keep and bear arms, at least in their homes.

A historic victory in the right to keep and bear arms.

All god's children will be packin' heat now!

(Peter) But the government is still empowered to regulate gun ownership, and it can ban certain weapons.

AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals.

(Peter) So our current argument about guns is no longer about basic rights, but about the kind of society "we the people"want.

(Peter) It seems as if the original Bill of Rights, although the text hasn't changed, it's meaning has changed significantly, since it was written.

How do you apply the principles of the Bill of Rights to modern situations that the founders couldn't have imagined?

They picked, sometimes, these absolutely brilliant words that invite modern Americans to pay attention to modern society even as they're applying ancient principles.

They said punishment can't be "unusual."

The word itself tells us to pay attention to evolving norms.

So putting a 17-year-old to death because he committed a murder-- at a certain point in American history that was not unusual, that was common.

Today it's become unusual and therefore, unconstitutional.

People think of these as fundamental rights.

You know, fundamental rights, we just based the country on, but we keep changing them, we keep reinterpreting them, now they mean this, now they mean that.

How can both things be true?

We add to them, we don't subtract from them, and we add to them in order to keep them real and alive, vibrant, relevant to "We the people"today.

(Peter) Perhaps nothing in the Bill of Rights is changing as fast, or as profoundly, as the Fourth Amendment, the one that protects our privacy.

We thought we knew exactly what it meant until the dawning of the age of digital technology and of global terrorism.

So the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees me that I'll be secure in my person and my papers and that I will not be subject to unreasonable search and seizure by the government.

I'm about to do what countless Americans do every day, I'm going to give up those rights, I am gonna go get searched.

I'm gonna be patted down or scanned down to my skin.

I'm going to give government agents my bag and let them search through the whole thing, my papers, everything I've got in there.

Why am I going to do that?

Because otherwise they wouldn't let me on the plane.

(Peter) In the post-9/11 world, security is tight, especially at airports.

We may have the right to privacy in the Fourth Amendment, but we willingly give it up in order to feel safer.

And not everybody is happy about that.

One clever designer even created a line of underwear with the text of the Fourth Amendment stitched in metallic thread to show up on X-ray scanners.

Just a gentle tweak for the folks in airport security.

But it's not just at airports.

Wherever we go it seems, we're being watched, tracked, followed.

Efrat Cohen is intensely aware of our loss of privacy.

She benefits from it.

Efrat is a private eye who specializes in digital snooping.

You were born in Israel, and you said that growing up in Israel you said you get really used to heavy security,Absolutely.

because there's armed people everywhere, there's checkpoints everywhere.

And people are okay with it-- if they didn't have a checkpoint everywhere, people would be alarmed.

Now you're a private investigator.Yes.

So what you do for a living is, you look up peoples' secrets.

Yes.

And how do you do that?

Facebook, Google, Twitter, everything is out there; people put it out there.

So just as an exercise, we asked you to look into me.

So what were you able to find out about me?

You've never been evicted.

That's good.

We found out who your wife is, how old she is, all her relatives, all your relatives.

You don't need a warrant or anything to find this stuff out.

Do not need, no.

When you went further what were you able to find out about me.

I was able to find out that you were overweight.

I was...

I am?

At some point in your life, you were overweight.

And how did you find that out?

I found that out because you chose to say that to someone.

Really.Right.

I have to say, I mean it's kind of shocking to hear you say that, but it's true-- I blogged about it.

If an insurance company read that, they think we might want to raise his insurance.

Really?

Wow.Yes.

Okay, what else.

I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable but keep it coming.

I found out through your daughter, who's 11...

Through my daughter?Yes.

Through your daughter, who's great, cause she's 11 and...

Wait a minute, how did you get in touch with my daughter?

Because I found out your daughters' names.

Two of them don't have a Facebook account, and one of them does.

And I know all her likes and all her dislikes, and I know when she'll be home watching her favorite show.

All the websites that you visited, all the music that you listen to on Pandora, the books that you buy on Amazon, all the phone calls that you make on Skype, it's all there.

That's terrifying!

I mean, we're blessed with freedom.

We get to say and do whatever we want.

But we just can't do it in secret.

There is no secret-- it's an illusion.

Can the government get that information from Amazon and Google?

Absolutely.

And Google and Facebook will give them the information.

Anytime you say "government,"people just start thinking negative thoughts, you know.

But when you say "Facebook," you're like okay, I can't wait to get back and see what my friends have been up to.

It seems as if your ultimate point isn't that we've had our privacy taken from us, but that we've given it away.

We've given it away.

(Peter) These days, we all leave a digital trail behind us, even, it seems, when we're doing our best to be discreet.

The nation's keeper of secrets was keeping a scandalous one of his own.

Emails between Petraeus and his biographer , (Peter) I'll confess I'm a social media addict--I tweet all day.

I share my movements and my activities with the whole world.

But is social media the death of the Fourth Amendment?

Is privacy a thing of the past?

[people whistle] (Peter) Oh, that's excellent!

Awesome, here we go.

Taking a picture.

I am so tweeting this right now.

All right, tweeting it.

(man) That's Twitter.

(Peter) Yeah.

Let's talk about privacy.

Twitter has had some instances where like law enforcement has wanted access to your information.

What have they wanted from you?

Yeah, generally they want the stuff that is private...

Which is?...so things like which IP addresses so those are the-- basically the computer addresses when you log into Twitter.

Do I have any legal protections?

This is one of the things that is interesting about the translation of the Fourth Amendment from 225 years ago to today, is with all this stuff sort of everywhere, one of the changes is that you might not even know that someone is trying to get access to your information.

Right, because my informa-- it's not like I have my house and there's somebody sneaking through the window to get at my papers.

I just send information about myself to the Internet, and if somebody's looking out there on the Internet at me, I don't know.

I don't think that the mere technology that one uses should have an impact on what the Fourth Amendment says.

So the extent that you use a carrier pigeon or Twitter, you still should have that protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Whether that's the law now, that's a much more complicated question, but our general policy is to tell users whenever we get a request for their information and so the idea there is to give you what you need in order to be able to assert your rights.

(Peter) Technology is moving at warp-drive speed.

And our culture is being transformed along with it.

Can the Constitution keep up?Taxi!

I made a date to talk to Jennifer Granick about it-- she's the director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford.

But she's in northern California, and right now I'm in Washington, D.C. Of course, these days that's really no obstacle.

Hello, Jennifer, how are you?

I'm good, how are you, Peter?

I'm fine.

We're driving around in a cab and I am speaking to you on this laptop via the miracle of the Internet.

One thing I've heard people say is that in this digital age, that there's no such thing as privacy anymore.

[laughs] The Fourth Amendment can do this job.

I think a lot of people originally thought of privacy as being synonymous with secrecy, I think we're increasingly looking at privacy as being synonymous with control.

It's just a question of figuring out how to do that properly given how fast technology has changed and how different things are today.

(Peter) This is interesting as we're talking about this, because there's the Supreme Court, which has scaffolding on it, like they're trying to renovate the law.

(Jennifer) Yeah, they're fixing it.

(Peter) How do you think the Bill of Rights as a whole has managed to evolve?

(Jennifer) Cracks are showing in the Bill of Rights and I think technology is putting them there.

For me, I think the law can help us manage this problem.

We have both individual rights and the rule of law and democracy, and we need to have them both and have that balance, or else we're losing something that's really important.

(Peter) So in the end, maybe that's what makes this a free country-- individual rights and the rule of law.

The Constitution not only establishes our freedoms, it gives us the institutions to protect them and fight for them.

But not every country's citizens are so lucky.

I've reached the final stop on this particular journey-- Mogadishu, Somalia.

No, actually it's Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is home to the largest Somali community in the country.

[speaking in Somali, then English] How are you?

(Peter) Fathia Absie was born in Somalia, but as a child she fell in love with the idea of America.

At the age of 14, she left home, left her country, and made her way to the U.S. with a student visa.

Since then, she's been granted political asylum, because her native land is in chaos.

And she's begun a career as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker.

You wouldn't be able to find that in the Mall of America.

This is great but I-I just can't wear, I'm not thin enough to wear pleats.

You came a long way to be here.

I have.

I have.

I'm from a world where, with every new government, the constitution changes.

[laughs] You know?

And it works like that in many countries all over the world.

I came from a clan-based society, and wrong or right, you always stand with your clan.

You know?

And I didn't understand as a child.

"Why?

"I mean you always, you stand for the, you know, the truth and justice.

I knew I wanted to come to United States of America; it was very clear to me.

Why is that, what's the difference?

Only in America would you have a person, you know, a Jewish, a Muslim, and a Christian standing together demanding the same thing.Right.

And protecting one another at the end of the day, because of the greater good.

You know sometimes America has not lived up to its promise.

There's been some anti-Muslim prejudice in this country since 9/11.

I know America's not perfect.

There is gonna be some failure, but I mean, what I am seeing is a country that is, you know, trying its best to be better.

You know?

Um, and to always be better than it was in the past.

Yes, it may be slow-moving, but where else do you see that?

You know?

(Peter) Fathia's right-- though our country is far from perfect, it may be "perfectible," but it's not a straight line.

You can see the ups and downs in our constitutional history: The Bill of Rights spells out our freedoms, but sometimes we've had to fight to claim them.

And things can get messy when you try to protect everyone's rights in a complicated country where people don't see eye to eye.

Unlike the Arizona Leathernecks, we can't always resolve our differences in a bar fight.

The Constitution's guarantees are ambiguous, and they're subject to debate, That idea that through struggle and argument, we can make our country better-- that is our most basic right.

Equal protection under the law is guaranteed by our Constitution.

The laws of the nation should apply to everyone.

It's such an important part of how we understand ourselves as Americans.

(Peter) But in our quest for equality have we gone too far or not far enough?

We should have the same right to drink out of a water fountain and to marry each other as anyone else does.

(Peter) Next time on"Constitution USA" with me, Peter Sagal.

To learn more about the Constitution visit the series website... "Constitution USA" with Peter Sagal is available on DVD.

To order, please visit shopPBS.org or call... CC--Armour Captioning &TPT