What gets missed in all of the hullabaloo about the "national security" objectives of the surveillance state that Bush and the lapdog Congress have imposed on us is that all of this monitoring, searching, etc. gets into much more than looking for suspected terrorists. Anyone remember Michael Vick getting busted with weed by TSA while going through a search at the airport (long before the dog fighting disclosure)? Just like the discovery of Spitzer's whoring, the increased scrutiny aimed at "terrorists" winds up catching others in the dragnet. This kind of total surveillance society is something that so-called "law and order conservatives" have been dreaming about for decades, and the "war on terror" handed them this issue up on a silver platter. It's something that should scare the bejeesus out of folks who value liberty and privacy.

That said, with respect to Spitzer, to the extent that the Feds are checking the account activity of our elected officials to monitor transactions suggestive of possible corruption, I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing. Provided it wasn't politically motivated in the first instance, that is. Although query whether the investigators should have simply shut down their investigation when they found no evidence of corruption. True, there are people who will say that "he's still committing a crime" -- but at what point does that logic stop? Do we really want a society that prosecutes every person who commits a technical criminal violation, even if those "crimes" might be a little unsavory?