Sir, Cheminsky teaches at USC Law, was one of my favorite teachers there. It's good to see his insights, while his views are often more liberal than mine(and most of those at 'SC) he is widely considered one of the leading Con Law experts, even if he teaches at a non-East Coast school.:)
As I stated, the fear I have is the 70% or so I see in the polls eager to give up some personal freedom or civil liberties. The question is usually so slanted, i.e. "Would you be willing to give up some personal freedom to be safer?" that it basically provides the intended answer. What's the option? Stay the same, well that must mean I am unsafe...Hmm, why of course I'll give up civil liberties!
That's the worry, and such thinking will do more damage than all the bombers and hi-jackers combined.
I had some experience at the US Atty's office, if one wants to take a car away from a Crystal Meth dealer I am the man, and I can say with my limited experience the issue we need to face is sharing of info by disparate governmental sources. Way too much fiefdom-thinking even in our own halls of govt...
One can safely assume that there was much data on a majority of these perps, and that agencies were not sharing info as they could/should. My hope is that is the outcome of all this, that we see Ridge or whomever mandating the sharing of info. That will go a lot further than much of the measures I have seen offered today and recently.
I do fear a lot of law enforcement will try and sidestep their failure in countering the possibility of something like the current attack by requesting more powers historically denied them. The one exception I have would be the ability to "tap" a person versus one static phone number. Much of the other ideas (foreign sourced surveillance, national ID cards, omnipresent CC cameras) scare the mojo out of me.
Let's keep the country we have, otherwise why try and protect it? Worries me when we start the "lose a few civil liberties" talk.
midnite |
