Wolf?

Hand-wringing continues over the Patriot Act. To hear people complaining, or to read the e-mails from moveon.org, we're all about to be herded into concentration camps.

The Senate Judiciary committee is preparing to hear testimony about the dangers of this act. Hopefully, this will be an honest evaluation. One will be useful, because a fair amount of misinformation has made it into the public meme pool.

Last fall, just weeks before the presidential election, we even witnessed false reports in newspapers across the country that a federal court had struck down parts of the act as unconstitutional.

In addition, those who cite various dire consequences of the Patriot Act can never seem to cite the provisions that enable them, or cases where such abuses have occurred.

False reports and scare tactics serve no legitimate cause and greatly disserve the American people. Whenever real civil-liberties problems do arise, we must learn about them right away, so that we can fix them swiftly. It is for precisely this reason that I have long been concerned about false allegations of civil-rights deprivations. Every false allegation undermines every true one, and that hurts us all. After all, scaring people about false civil-rights deprivations unnecessarily divides our nation and makes no one safer. If anything, false claims about civil liberties actually make it harder to monitor real civil liberties issues in the future — for the same reason that eventually no one listened to the fabled little boy who kept "crying wolf."

This is a worthy concern. False alarms will undermine any security program. Indeed, I've linked to articles (courtesy of Bruce Schneier) making the case that all the new security protocols implemented in airports and elsewhere fail every time they catch someone carrying a nail trimmer or a poppy-seed muffin. This is a false positive which wastes time and resources, undermines confidence in any positive response from the system, and eats away at the public's ability to tolerate the system.