Ever since the Patriot Act was enacted, Russ Feingold had been almost single-handedly (at least among members of Congress) trying to warn of the potential for abuse of NSLs. Finally, a couple of months prior to the time the Patriot Act was to be renewed in early 2006, Feingold got some help in his crusade, when The Washington Post's Barton Gellman published a superb investigative article which detailed the FBI's increasingly frequent and broad use of NSLs, and surveyed the obvious dangers from these unchecked surveillance instruments.

It seems there are a few brand new lessons that we can perhaps draw from these revelations ... Allowing government officials to engage in surveillance on American citizens with no warrant requirement ensures that surveillance will be used for improper ends, against innocent Americans.  

While the president will give it high marks, in fact, DHS stands at the bureaucratic equivalent of early adolescence, which means it has taken both right and wrong steps, but is still struggling to decide what is important. It shows potential, but it needs more support if it is to achieve long-term success.

There is a growing gap between what DHS is expected to do -- secure our borders, protect critical infrastructure, share better intelligence, defend against weapons of mass destruction, and respond to disasters -- and its actual capacity to do them. The reasons for the gap have to do with strategy, priority, ideology, and politics.

What's excessive is the idea that we have to steel the national will to respond to an evil of such magnitude. No, we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. Otherwise, if their perverse ambitions to heroism are based on the idea that they are the vanguard of the clash of civilizations, why should we gratify their ambitions? Think of it this way, what if those who frequent the chat rooms found their cause disappearing from the headlines? What if they couldn't find themselves when they try to vanity google? What if they faded from being such a big part of our consciousness? Who would that really hurt -- us, or them?

Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism.

Trying to stop the flow of immigrants when they reach our border is, in sum, a fool's game. The question is whether you stop some immigrants before they leave home.