This morning’s must-read…Heather Mac Donald in the NY Post on the debate over renewal of the Patriot Act. An excerpt:

There is a slippery-slope problem in terror investigations — but it runs the other way. Going back to the 1970s, libertarians of all political stripes have piled restriction after restriction on intelligence-gathering, even preventing two anti-terror FBI agents from collaborating on a case if one was an “intelligence” investigator and the other a “criminal” investigator. By the late ’90s, the bureau worried more about avoiding a pseudo-civil liberties scandal than about preventing a terror attack. No one demanding the ever-more Byzantine protections against hypothetical abuse asked whether they were exacting a cost in public safety. We know now that they were.

Heather, as always, nails it.

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