I know that we public defenders have many more immediate problems here, in the trenches of the criminal courts, than the military campaign which is being waged in Afghanistan. Our government's initial response to the attack on the World Trade Center towers was to increase racial, religious and ethnic profiling; expand the power of police departments and intelligence agencies to conduct national-security wiretaps in criminal prosecutions; and place further restrictions on the rights of immigrants. Profiling of Muslims and persons of Middle Eastern appearance has already served to effectively exclude these communities wholesale from the call for national unity, as well as targeting them for hate crimes and other forms of discrimination. Passage of the U.S. Act to Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (or PATRIOT) now allows pen register/trap-and-trace orders for routing and addressing information for Internet communications, expands the government's wiretapping powers under ...