Editor's notebook

POLICE FILES - An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union called the recent state police release of files on covert surveillance targets "a joke." Maybe so, but we don't hear anyone laughing.

The police are still coping with the aftermath of the disclosure, forced by the ACLU, that a 14-month spying program was conducted against anti-death-penalty and anti-war activists. Police never had any evidence that crimes were planned or contemplated - the only thing that could have justified such spying. But more than 50 activists wound up on state and federal databases classed as terrorists, based on nothing but...