RE: HOMELAND SECURITY HOAX

Possibly my favorite part of the story you linked, Dave, is the part that essentially reads, "it is unclear what the student's motivation was." Hmmmmm, let me think. He's a 22-year old college student in Mass. who lies about DHS's survelliance activities in a manner embarassing to DHS - at a time when homeland security efforts are under fire and the Patriot Act in political jeporady - and that strongly undermines homeland security efforts in the eyes of civil libertarians on both sides of the political fence, as well as President Bush. Gee. I don't know what he possibly could have been thinking. At age 21 when I was writing "Sheppard's America" in the Collegian, I hadn't a clue of my motivations either.

Let me add that this whole episode with the faux DHS monitoring story demonstrates why there are now two media in this country, one on the left and one on the right. At least these days, going forward, there are some media outlets that will look at these types of stories with great skepticism before running with them willy-nilly, finding out they're a hoax, and never reporting the fraud after maximum damage to whatever political demon of MSM the hoax had targeted had already been inflicted. Two Americas? Hardly. Two media? For sure.