Get Off My Lawn, Pretty Please?

Hering's editorial for today isn't actually that bad... except for one giant, glaring error.

Well, there may be more than one. The beginning:

The case of Brandon Mayfield is a poor test of the secret searches and surveillance authorized by the Patriot Act. It’s a poor test because the man was no terrorist. Instead he turned out to be an innocent man wrongly suspected of being involved in an atrocity in Spain.

OK, yeah, that's an error. Last time I checked, we were talking about the process, not the outcome. If the process - in this case the new PATRIOT Act stuff - is good, then the fact that Mayfield was wrongly accused should not matter, right? If the process that the government used to go after him was legal... but apparently it somehow makes a difference.

Anyway. Moving on:

Suppose the government gets wind that somebody with links to al-Qaida has recently signed for shipments of material that could be assembled into a bomb to spread poison gas. Getting a warrant and searching his address would tip off the terrorist cell, if any. So the government uses the Patriot Act to do a search in secret and — a week and a half later — manages to arrest the entire cell together as they huddle in the basement assembling their own version of a WMD.

Is anybody other than the terrorists going to complain about how the search was conducted and the evidence obtained?

Oops. There's the giant glaring error, or, as I like to call it, Hasso's latest lie by omission. I refuse to believe the man is stupid, so I can only assume this is intentional.

Hering sets up a dichotomy here that turns out to be false. He claims the choices are between a) "Getting a warrant and searching his address would tip off the terrorist cell..." or b) "So the government uses the Patriot Act to do a search in secret..."

Problem is - well there are actually two problems. The first problem is that Hering never establishes why option A results in the terrorist cell being tipped off - certainly the search can be conducted when no one is home, yes?

But the second problem is the bigger one: There is already a way, without resorting to the PATRIOT Act, to get a secret warrant. It's called the FISA Act, and it allows for all kinds of secret and nasty shit on the part of the government. Hering's omission of this (or any other kind of) option is misleading. Of course, it's kind of obvious where he falls:

Let us also hope that when there’s an actual and imminent threat of terrorist destruction, government agents do whatever it takes in the time required to protect us from that threat. (hh)

Yup. He's been watching 24 again.