I spent quite a bit of time yesterday watching the Patriot Act debates on C-SPAN. I've seen a lot of debates and this one took the cake for grandstanding moments. But my favorite was one Republican who stood in favor of full renewal of section 215, which allows the government to use secret national security letters to get information like hospital records or library records where the organization cannot disclose they were subpoenad and the subject never finds out. He, like many, many other republicans referred to the recent events in London and said that in Leeds, there is a bookstore that sells radical muslim materials and the bombers were known to shop there. "If London had a section 215, they may have been able to arrest these guys before these terrible events happened."
This guy completely missed the point! That's exactly the scenario that scares opponents of the section the most-- the cops are going to subpoena bookstores that sell radical materials for their customer lists and go around and arrest them?
We are walking a dangerous line here, towards a society where just reading, or thinking, or saying is criminal. A free society will never catch all the criminals, yet crimes like 9/11 and 7/7 are so terrible, and kill so many, that our instinct is to do "anything possible" to catch the bad guys. This is the hardest space for a free society to navigate and we're doing it during a really tough period. After watching yesterday’s debate, I'm not sure we're going to walk out of this on the other end free.
I don't want to see any more terrorist acts, but catching terrorists by surveillance, or questioning, or arresting people who read radical books is not a tool law enforcement should be able to use to prevent them. Maybe in China, not in the United States.