A story in today's New York Times brought me back to this train of thought.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
"For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target" by Colin Monyhan and Scott Shane is worth reading in full. (But I'll do excerpts for those of us who don't have free access to the Times or who are so worn out from the holiday weekend we don't have the energy to click a link.)
Mr. [Scott] Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.'s increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
--snip--
Mr. Crow seems alternately astonished, angered and flattered by the government's attention. "I've had times of intense paranoia," he said, especially when he discovered that some trusted allies were actually spies."But first, it makes me laugh," he said. "It's just a big farce that the government's created such paper tigers. Al Qaeda and real terrorists are hard to find. We're easy to find. It's outrageous that they would spend so much money surveilling civil activists, and anarchists in particular, and equating our actions with Al Qaeda."
So which reaction seems most appropriate -- astonishment, anger, feeling flattered, paranoia, bemusement that the FBI considers you a threat, outrage at the time and money they're spending on surveillance, or something else?
And if the FBI is going to be doing things like this, what limits should there be on what their agents do?