<If an officer of the law suspects someone of wrongdoing, there are other methods besides running a secret check on everyone who has borrowed a copy of Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques (also available for sale at your friendly neighborhood gun show, and thus nearly untraceable in any meaningful way). Stakeouts and tails come to mind. With legwork, there will be substance behind a warrant request, and we will avoid the whole secret police thing. Or are we simply unwilling to recruit, train and pay people to do this, and so resort to the lazy man's dragnet?

The Fourth is also interpreted to mean that evidence gathered without a warrant by an officer while it is in plain sight during the course of an investigation is admissable. So they will have to keep their eyes open, and what's wrong with that? Terrorists, we have seen, make obvious mistakes all the time. If people had been paying closer attention when issuing visas, just as an example, the whole of last year's history could have been different.



I'm not sure why dozens of plainclothesmen wandering the library looking for suspicious activity is any kind of improvement over an FBI clerk matching a list of names of people who checked out a suspicious book with other lists to see if there's a connection. In a lot of ways, dealing with a pile of bored recently-hired cops may be much worse.

The ultimate irony in this is that this kind of data gathering and integration procedure that is getting everyone so hot and bothered is exactly the sort of work that was NOT done prior to Sept. 11, which is why dots were not connected. If the Left had had its way in the last two decades, the FBI and CIA (assuming the latter had not been abolished outright) would have been laboring under even more restrictions on information gathering and sharing.

We need to make up our minds:

Individual liberty and privacy in its best and purest form, or the highest possible level of personal safety?

I will respectfully listen to the opinions of someone who takes either position, or someone (like myself) who is uncertain about exactly where the line must be drawn.

Those who refuse to deal with the problem at all, like the ones who bitch about our loss of liberty one minute and then turn around and ream out the authorities for not having "done their job" prior to Sept. 11, should just be ignored.