ONE REASON that I haven’t written more about homeland security lately is that I don’t think much has happened to change what I said in earlier columns like this one, or this one, or, for that matter, this one, which was written on September 12, 2001.

But this article on the Patriot Act and the PR wars over it is well worth reading. And this quote from Viet Dinh explains why it may have been a mistake for the Administration, too:

“The USA Patriot Act has become a brand,” says Georgetown University Law Center professor Viet Dinh, who was instrumental in drafting the act as head of the DOJ’s legal policy shop from 2001 to 2003. “Activists lump everything that is objectionable about the war on terror, anything wrong with the world really, onto the USA Patriot Act. No more than 10 percent of what people ascribe to the USA Patriot Act on any given day, is in the Patriot Act itself.”

I wish I’d thought of that objection when I was opposing it. But while I think that the Patriot Act was a bad idea, and that most of it consisted of longstanding bureaucratic wishlists that had little to do with fighting terror, I also think that we still haven’t seen any sort of very useful analysis of what has worked and what hasn’t. This article is a good start at unpacking the debate, but we need much more.

And it’s worth asking why the many, many members of Congress from both parties who voted for the Act haven’t done much to advance the debate.