[Clara Lou]

Well, I certainly hope that the government isn't listening to any terrorist phone conversations or checking any terrorist email. It's an invasion of privacy. So is scanning for radiation. Better people die than have any of that going on.

[Uncle Vlad]

And checking peoples' bags before they get on the subway (tubes)--that should be right out, too. It would be better for hundreds of people to be killed by a suicide bomber than to offend one individual who thinks the whole freaking world revolves around him.

[holden]

IMHO, this is necessarily a transitional state. The nostalgia for "the good old days" in combination with the pent-up resentment and anger about being over-policed will trip this dialectic into a very different state.

As a match to dry tinder, what we see now must change, upon being sparked by the next sufficiently heinous act of Islamist terror.

Americans, if not Brits, will demand a reckoning fight, that we might once again live without fearful police or military presences to protect us. We're not inclined simply to grit our teeth and take it on the chin.

HF