Globed

My first article in the Boston Globe appeared today. Yay!

The Sensible Choice

Buried in the second-to-last paragraph of Richard Posner's recent essay in The New Republic is the first public expression of a solution I have long proposed to the controversy surrounding government wiretaps of private communications. Let the government wiretap to its heart's content with one proviso: the intelligence gathered can only be used in a terrorism case. Posner fomulates is thus:

Permit surveillance intended to detect and prevent terrorist activity but flatly forbid the use of information gleaned by such surveillance for any purpose other than to protect national security. So, if the government discovered, in the course of surveillance, that an American was not a terrorist but was evading income tax, it could not use the discovery to prosecute him for tax evasion or sue him for back taxes.

Isn't this the perfect solution?