Editor, Daily Nexus,

The Nov. 3 editorial, “Your Friendly PATRIOT Act,” missed a crucial piece of “whiny liberals'” objection to the USA PATRIOT Act. It isn’t a misguided fear of government that leads such notoriously liberal organizations as the American Library Association to object to the PATRIOT Act. Those who object are objecting not out of a belief that the nebulous but generally benevolent government will abruptly become a tyrannical dictatorship simply because a Saudi immigrant is denied a visa; the objectors speak because they fear that an individual within the government will use his new discretionary powers to deny that Saudi for reasons like ethnicity or religion. And when civil libertarians complain that they will be spied on, they do so not out of self-important, unjustified fear; among other examples, recently declassified FBI documents reveal that Director J. Edgar Hoover used the FBI to spy upon anyone he disagreed with, among them Abby Hoffman and Martin Luther King Jr.

Perhaps the danger to freedom that the PATRIOT Act represents will be no greater than that of John Adams

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