There were some striking similarities between the carnage in Boston at the finish line of the marathon a few weeks ago and the bombing of the World Trade Center 20 years ago. Both were acts of terrorism. Both, tragically, led to deaths (three in Boston, six in New York) and to far more injuries (264 in Boston, more than a thousand in New York). Both exposed anew how vulnerable we are to terrorist acts. And both raised issues of preventing terrorist acts while still preserving as much personal privacy as is possible.
I recently had occasion to revisit my own reaction to the latter issue while preparing a book which is about to be published entitled Friend of the Court: On The Front Lines With the First Amendment. One of the articles I wrote that I chose to include in the book was one I had written shortly after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Entitled (not by me but by the editors of The New York Times magazine where it appeared) "Big Brother’s Here and Alas We Embrace Him," the article was a lot less definitive than the title sounds. It took no firm position at all but was sort of an elegy to privacy, an ambivalent overview of the topic.
