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The federal government’s costly and complex terrorism-funding suit against five former officials of a now-defunct Islamic charity ended in mistrial last month—marking another high-profile setback for the U.S. Justice Department.

President Bush had announced in December 2001 that he was freezing the assets of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, declaring that the radical group Hamas was a major recipient of money from the charity. At the time, Holy Land was considered the largest Muslim charity in the U.S.

Each time “someone clicks on a Web page, makes a phone call, uses a credit card, or checks in with a microchipped pass at work, that person leaves a data trail that can later be tracked. Every day, billions of bits of such personal data are stored, sifted, analysed, cross- referenced . . . to build up profiles to predict possible future behaviour” (the Economist, September 29, “Learning to Live with Big Brother”). Can we escape? Never. “America . . . has an estimated 30 m[illion] surveillance cameras. . . .