Betsy Newmark teaches history and government to high school students in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her teaching contributes to her stature as a blogger.

Writing at Betsy's Page, her blog, on July 31, 2005, she endorsed a particularly authoritarian strategy for combating domestic terrorism [hyperlinks and the misspelling of Frances Stead Sellers' name in the original]:

Frances Sellars captures a lot of what I think about the idea of installing surveillance cameras all over in the U.S. as an anti-terrorism or anti-crime effort. I have no worries about our suddenly becoming a police state with our every motion detected. Face it, our lives aren't that exciting and no police organization has the time or manpower to sit every day and monitor those cameras. However, on the off chance that some crime happens at that spot, the cameras would be an invaluable aid to catching the criminals. And that makes it worth it to me. Face it. Who but the paranoid among us really care about the cameras in the bank or the department store? Why not have that same level of security in public places? Let's get over our fear of an Orwellian 1984 and face our fears of a terroristic 2005.

Frances Stead Sellers is an editor at the Washington Post's Sunday commentary section, Outlook, which published the commentary to which Mrs. Newmark responds.

And actually, although Mrs. Newmark doesn't mention it, Sellers' commentary focused on the widespread use of public surveillance in Britain. "Britain has become the world's premier surveillance society," Sellers says. Sellers also describes an American reaction to such surveillance, a case history that I was unaware of, "Americans are, comparatively speaking, camera shy... [W]hen Washington installed cameras on the Mall in 2002, the questions sparked by civil liberties groups led to their use being strictly regulated." Wouldn't you have thought that Mrs. Newmark – who, again, teaches government – could have found the wherewithal to acknowledge the concerns over compromised civil rights that can result from surveillance, in addition to advocating for more surveillance? In addition to doing her research at Amazon.com to find the cool technology that makes surveillance possible (see her hyperlink above), shouldn't she – as someone in a position of responsibility to teach and someone – have strived for balance on this issue, as her cited source does, rather than parroting the right-wing assertion that terrorism trumps all? (And how could someone who studied Russian at UCLA express such a blasé attitude towards the ability and propensity of a government to violate its citizens' civil rights?)