On national security

Liberals are criticizing the president's warrantless wiretapping, most of which, they say, involves scrutinizing innocent people. But isn't it true that in order to find the real terrorists you "have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off"? Clearly, the Fourth Amendment is outdated. The founding fathers would never have required searches to be "reasonable" if they had known about Al Qaeda.

To completely prevent a terrorist attack in the U.S., we must do much more. We're only safe if every American is scrutinized. Of course, it's difficult to do this and would require an infrastructure to be developed over a period of several years.

In addition to tracing every phone call, letter and email, we'd need to get more control over people's movements as well. A system of internal passports could accomplish this--if people had to provide identification when leaving their local area as well as reasons for leaving, terrorism would be much harder to organize.

To keep foreign terrorists from acting on our shores we should also seal our borders. No one should be allowed to enter or leave without express permission from United States intelligence officials. Clearly, we have to keep people with unknown motives from coming in. But we must also prevent people with no apparent official business abroad from slipping out of the country with information that would enable terrorists to more accurately pinpoint areas of high value for attacks.

At the same time, we must expel those within our borders whose ties to certain foreign lands make them questionable. Because of the mass deportations required, we'll need a system of temporary detention centers to confine them all while their backgrounds and potential actions are being investigated.

Domestic terrorism would still be a problem. After all, the vast majority of terrorist attacks on our homeland have come from such homegrown phenomena as anti-abortionists, survivalists, polygamists, high school students, postal workers and anti-technologists.

We'll need to create a government commission to address these diverse threats and long-term approaches to preventing them. One possible solution would be a sort of two-way TV screen in every household. This would address terrorism by the lone extremist who might create an explosives belt in the privacy of his or her home. It would also allow us to keep tabs on what people are talking about. We need to have a list of those who might be interested in resisting or thwarting our national security apparatus. Finally, it would serve as a means of keeping Americans informed on the latest threats to their security.

Of course, liberals and other terrorist-excusers will inevitably argue that the occasional terrorist attack is the price of freedom. These people should be watched closely.