All FBI agents are corrupt and plant evidence on suspects...

All cops are on the take and rob convenience stores when off-duty.

All judges are paid off by attorneys with big-bucks.

All IRS agents snoop on their neighbors and pay almost no taxes themselves.

Ashcroft is a religious zealot who covers bare-breasted statues and reads scripture to his co-workers.

There are bad apples in every group - and powerful positions attract more than there fair share of power-abusers. But one cannot form iontelligent policy based on the acts of the few.

The left in their efforts to damn Bush and his administration as being either negligent or complicit - make it all so much easier for bureaucrats to seize more power.

Heck, in today's era more criminal activity is occuring at Mary Anne's library and internet terminals than at the payphone of the local Circle K. The internet is THE tool of choice for global speed of light communications between terrorists and crime-lords.

Ol' pay-phones and secret flights carrying documents around the world are relics of another era. Today's terrorists are recruited and given instruction and propaganda over the internet. Many terrorists never meet face-to-face at all - but aere willing tools of someone in a far away land. Public internet terminals become safe-havens for someone not wanting to finger his location.

So the government naturally would love to be able to put a keyboard reader on all these terminals and hook them to terminals which trigger alerts if certain keywords are used. Naturally privacy takes a big hit. But on the other side folks like you and Lindy and others are certain that the FBI and CIA are somehow corrupt, complicit or incompetent when they don't stop the bad guys ahead of time.

No one wants to be called names - so they say, "ok...we'll get them faster...but we need the tools and freedom to do so." Suddenly the police-state increases. Not a surprise.

Perhaps if everyone with an anti-Bush agenda were not so critical - these folks would not be desperately seeking ways to extract more useful data.

The intelligence community lost a lot of people in the WTC - a fact most forget. If they could've stopped it they would have.

These people are human. They are not all "James Bond" or somehow super-intelligent know-it-alls. Most are simply government employees with not much more smarts than the average American - and a stressful job, a forming ulcer and a pending pension.

The left always builds up the government as being the panacea for all societal ills - somehow someone somewhere has to be blamed for 9-11, because everyone knows all things can be averted, all things can be controlled.

I'm afraid this is just not the case - no matter how many libraries are monitored or how much the police-state increases.

Balance. If people followed this watchword, we would all be much better off.

Best wishes,

SDAI-Tech1