This story covers a vital first-amendment and fourth-amendment issue. First, Kudos for covering it in a serious way. Second, the really chilling part, sort of buried in the story, is that it is obvious that the police overstepped their bounds by classifying people who "might disrupt" the event as being in the same class as actual death-threat candidates. The police chief should be fired, to make an example of him. The article does not go into the broader trend, evidenced in NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's imposition of open air cages dubbed, in elegant oxymoronic terms, "free speech zones." This creeping extension of executive privilidge, from the President, to governors, to lowly mayors, like other forms of corruption, will continue until people demand that it stop. It is supremely ironic that the supposedly literate newspaper, in the state where Emerson wrote so eloquently, is so blissfully unaware of its own seminal role in the history of political dissent, that it doesn't even bother to cite from one of the master's works. Or even Thoreau's. Another in the continuing saga of assaults on the first amendment.