I can never decide whether to laugh or cry when I read another article by a columnist who is (relatively speaking) new to the realities of the online world. They are always shocked--SHOCKED!--to find out that giving out their email address to a reading public in the millions can generate several thousand emails on a controversial topic (Colbert's performance, in this case). A few months ago it was the Post as a whole when they temporarily shut down their comments blog; this time it's Cohen. Should I laugh at their predictable but still absurd reaction, or should I cry because, more than a decade after the Web gained steam, they are still so clueless?

There is now no filter between the writers and the public they write for and/or to, and I suspect that they find it disorienting and, honestly, threatening. If political and public discourse is taken up by bloggers, online publications, and the public itself, what will "traditional" columnists like Cohen, George Will, Maureen Dowd, and the like do for a living? And when the public is no longer held at bay by interns sifting through hard-copy letters, what is a columnist like Cohen to think when one column generates so much invective?

One can of course try to educate such folks about the realities of online life, the existence of flamewars, spam, trolls, and all the other denizens of the internet. But I suspect, honestly, that Mr. Cohen and his ilk will continue to be baffled, befuddled, frightened, and uncomprehending in the face of those realities, and will struggle along, ocassionally writing articles like this, until they are supplanted by younger folks who grew up immersed in the online world. In the meantime we must decide: do we pity the Cohens of the world and try to help them understand, or do we endure them, knowing them to be unteachable? I don't know the answer, but the continuing flow of cluelessness from the "MSM" in this area would tend to suggest the latter.

Actually, the question is not, "If FBI agents can -– with just a few minutes' prior notice -- go rifling through the office of the executive director of the CIA, how hard would it be to give a couple of Justice Department investigators the security clearances they need to look into the role department lawyers played in the NSA warrantless spying program?" The real question is this: If FBI agents can do that to the *office of the executive direcotr of the CIA*, how much more so is it easy for them, using data they can obtain easily from the NSA, to raid the home of whoever the heck they want?

If the executive director of the CIA--a person who, one assumes, wields at least a modicum of political power, as well as being fairly closely allied with the Administration in power--can be put up against the wall that quickly, why on Earth should we assume that they will leave all other Americans (especially those *without* Foggo's connections) alone, particularly those who have made enemies in the Bush Administration. What's to stop them, the goodness of their hearts? We should *trust* these people to do the right thing?

Those are the real questions, friends.

Ordinarily I don't respond to other posters, but rather only comment on the articles. However, I just want to say, "No Name Given," that your courage in castigating Tim Grieve is pretty much nullified by the fact that you declined to give a name. Quite aside from the fact that Ms. Miller has an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to think anyone would take her seriously when writing about the exact same topic on which she was previously so spectacularly wrong.

While I am not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page it is a widely-respected paper as a news source, and I must say that I'm astounded that they would take a totally disgraced reporter from no less a "MSM" outlet than the New York Times and allow her license to "report" on the very same topic that she was so easily gulled on previously. And anonymously calling Grieve out for pointing out this absurdity is pretty weak tea.

I know that you were focusing on detective/mystery/horror genre books, but I sure would love to see someone at Salon--Scott Rosenberg, maybe?--sometimes review books from the genre that I read regularly: Science Fiction.

Maybe I'm being silly, but I would think that a literary magazine (Salon), in a very 21st Century medium (the Web-based magazine), which no doubt has plenty of SF-reading readers (computer geeks often read SF) would want to target that audience. At least, you know, once in a while.

I mean, you review graphic novels every other week; I have seen interviews with folks like Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks here (though rarely); how about tossing some crumbs to us technonerd types?

I am hardly of the alarmmist persuasion; you know: one of those people who thinks we are heading for a true police state. But these stories--and there seem to be more every day--make me feel that there is only one way to combat government intrusiveness. (And by the way, I thought conservatives were *against* the government intruding into private lives?)

The time has clearly come to encrypt email and other web traffic so that government sniffing and fishing expeditions get nothing more than pseudo-random nonsense. While I have nothing to hide, and nothing that I send out (or surf to) is very embarassing, it is simply not the government's business, and under this administration, I certainly don't trust in their good sense or good intentions to "do the right thing."

Encryption now; it's clearly the only way to spike the guns of these nosey bozos.