Leans too heavily on why people who were being spied on found it appalling. I get the idea in one or two quotes. The bulk of this article could have been devoted to a true analysis of the rights that were violated.

While well sourced, I have a problem with how this story is reported. The reporter had a choice to focus on the civil liberties angle, or the 'absurdity' angle. The latter won the day in this report. Is the issue that Maryland Police made stupid decisions regarding who to spy on, or that they were spying on anyone at all? This question should have been explored, in my mind.

The attacks on constitutionally guarrantteed rights is not over and unless every official is held accountable as this article begins to do, we will repeat this era just as we repeated the Nixon era.

It's decent writing, and doesn't represent much investigation - only writing up what was made available by those offended by the unreasonable intrusion into their peaceful exercise of civil rights. It's information that people should know, but the style of writing isn't going to hold most people's interest through to the second page and certainly isn't going to inflame any passion as will tonight's AP story that Obama is linked to the Blagdonovich arrest. That happens not to be remotely true but at least the writer injected some fire. This is good information, but it's presented as a summary. No sterling effort, this.

It starts out as good journalism, exploring a type of activity we had hoped had ended a long time ago (but feared it hadn't). But it stays more with anecdotes. It does mention the civil liberties implications. Where it falls down is in exploring what it will take to get these people out of the various data bases they are now undoubtedly in. What's needed is follow up to see how many of them are stopped when they go to board airplanes, for example.