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April 5, 2003

Who's Hysterical?

Your concerns about privacy in the face of government attempts to mine data on a previously unattainable scale are "hysterical" and "luddite" according to Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer with the Manhattan Institute, which WIRED, in its report on the annual Freedom, Computers, and Privacy Conference, helpfully identifies as a "conservative" think tank.

The Manhattan Institute's politics are not really at issue here, and the author of the piece should have set them aside, because what Mac Donald is pushing isn't so much an ideological agenda as it is an attempt to cow her audience with threats of dire consequences if we don't embrace an agenda that includes higher and higher levels of government intrusion in the foolish quest to create total security through "total information awareness."

Despite what Mac Donald says, though, she's the hysterical one, especially when she claims protests must end because they help the terrorists, and that secret arrest is a good thing.