And I still stand by what I wrote. I do not believe that the government and its agencies are the biggest threat to society - I believe that the biggest threat are those who believe that they can do whatever it takes to accomplish their own goals whatever those goals may be. I firmly believe that we need to protect ourselves from such individuals, and the government and its agencies (including law enforcement) are by far the most effective and fair way to do so. Is this way error proof? Of course not. Mistakes and unintended consequences happen all the time, and those who seek 100% security and certainty are fools deluding themselves with false hopes.
I am not a law-and-order type and I believe that all government agencies, especially those empowered to make life-and-death decision (e.g. law enforcement) should be held accountable to the reasonably high standards. I also believe that those who maliciously breach those standards should face stiff penalties. At the same tome, however, I believe it utterly foolish to prevent those people from doing their job in the name of abstractions and absolute ideals.
Due process is a good thing devised for protecting people from arbitrary abuses of power and should be protected as much as rationally feasible. But if it becomes a fundamentalist absolute overriding all other reasons and considerations, at the very least it becomes counterproductive to ultimate goal for which it was established in the first place - to protect public from abuses of power.
The abuses of power are by no means the sole domain of legitimate governments. In fact, governments , especially those in democracies, abuse power relatively rarely (albeit that does not mean they do not, and thus should be left "off the hook"). A much more frequent occurrence is abuse of power by individuals who believe they can do whatever it takes to accomplish what they want. That means a lot of people: those who disrupt peace and quiet of others or beat up "their" women because they feel like having some fun, to those who rob other people because they want things belonging to them, to those who ruin the lives of many because thy want to make a profit for themselves, as well as those who feel it is ok to kill other people to accomplish their own ideological or political objectives. By an and large, I believe that these people are a much larger and imminent threat to the public than most governments (save a few fascist dictatorships) have ever posed.
So it all comes down to risk assessment and being rationally pragmatic rather than dogmatically idealistic. It is a much greater risk to society and its members to dogmatically and rigidly stick to the due process principle when it can prevent public agencies from protecting people form a great harm, than to suspend that principle to avert that harm. To be sure, both strategies involve multiple risks, not just of harm to the public but also abuse, and that is why any breach of the due process should be carefully scrutinized for potential abuse. But such scrutiny should not turn into a witch hunt.
Let me add a personal comment. I am 52 years old, and most of my adolescent and adult life I traveled in the company of dissidents of various stripes. I like to question the status quo, the received wisdom, the dogma, the tradition, and the authority, and I am naturally attracted to people who feel the same. It took me a while to realize, however, that for some people this questioning of the status quo and the authority became the dogma, the religious knee-jerk contumacy if you will. I became fully aware of that during my involvement in the Solidarnosc movement in the late 1970s when I noticed that many people are willing to accept the most absurd on its face bullshit as long as it undermined the official institutions. At first I laughed when seriously ill people sought the advice of various quacks and faith healers, because they did not trust the "communist" health care system, but then I became a bit nervous when some self-styled activists for self-determination and human rights worshipped the CIA and Gen. Pinochet just to be "in the face" of the "communist" authorities.
I recognized the same pattern - only with reversed polarity - among many lefties and liberals - and the older I get the more annoying it appear to me. It is one thing when simple and poorly educated people believe some out-this-world 'gummint' conspiracy theories - but I think that well-read and traveled folk with advanced degree (by far the majority on this list and on the left in general) should exercise a better judgment. An when I start suspecting that this knee-jerk, bordering on paranoid contumacy suspicion of everything connected to the government and its agencies is in fact a religiously held dogma and a tradition - I start treating it as any other religious dogma: by giving it a healthy dose of dissent. A foolish skeptic criticizes dogmas of other people, a wise one - those of his own.
Wojtek