The Maryland experience illustrates one of the many vices of governmental databases that treat human beings as data. Whether they are used to identify or keep track of terrorists, hit men, or horse thieves, they need to be tightly controlled. A system that allows a state trooper to decide that political opposition to the death penalty equates to terrorism is shameful. The potential for abuse should have been obvious to the database creators who apparently let anyone with a badge decide who deserves to be treated as a terrorism suspect.

[Police Superintendent Terrence] Sheridan said protest groups were also entered as terrorist organizations in the databases, but his staff has not identified which ones.

Paying little heed to the First Amendment's prohibition of governmental interference with organizations that seek redress of political grievances, Maryland troopers infiltrated and spied upon activists who took positions disfavored by the Maryland police.

Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists. He called the spying a "deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary" on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance.

Astonishingly, the former state police superintendent who authorized state police to spy on war and death penalty opponents, Thomas E. Hutchins, defends the surveillance program that identified the "terrorists."

Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists "fringe people."

Allow me to introduce myself as one of the "fringe people" who opposes the war in Iraq, who opposes the death penalty, and who fully supports the exercise of First Amendment rights to protest both of those failed policies. Or is it Hutchins who is part of the "fringe," the few who feel threatened by those who exercise their constitutional rights to challenge right wing verities?