NYT Editorial: Justice and Prosecutorial Misconduct

He knowingly sent the wrong person to jail for 25 years.

Who will watch the watchmen? The question was first posed in Latin, but it is just as important today as it was 2,000 years ago. Power has to be kept in check, as the founders of our country knew when they designed a system of checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution. Any agency that has the power to protect us from enemies also has the power to do us great harm.

Police must be able to search for evidence, if they are to catch terrorists or other criminals. But when police can get access to information about us too easily, they regularly abuse their power. (See "Cops tap database to harass, intimidate." It is vital to protect citizens from police intrusion. In the United States, we do this by requiring the police to go to court and obtain a search warrant.

Today the security forces want to be allowed to seize credit card information from Internet sites without a court order; they want to be able to record what URLs you look at without a court order, which can tell them such information as what books you have bought. There will be no difficulty getting a court to approve a search warrant when there is credible evidence of a terrorist plot, so they can investigate terrorists without this change. Whenever police ask to be allowed to bypass search warrants, we must be on guard.

We depend on the FBI to investigate suspected terrorists, but who else will it investigate? Probably any real political opposition, since the FBI has a long history of investigating dissidents purely for their political views. Martin Luther King Jr.'s phone was tapped; his life-long commitment to non-violence apparently was not enough reason to consider him non-threatening. More recently, John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was investigated by the FBI as a criminal suspect based on no evidence except his political views.

http://stallman.org/watchmen.html