The United States faces, in the words of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, "a new and deadly virus."1 That virus is "terrorism, whose intent to inflict destruction is unconstrained by human feeling and whose capacity to inflict it is enlarged by technology."2 As the murderous attacks of September 11 painfully demonstrated, this new threat is unlike anything the nation has faced before. The combination of coordinated, well-financed terrorists, willing to sacrifice their lives, potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction, capable of operating within our own borders poses extraordinary risks to our security, as well as to our constitutional freedoms, which could all too easily be compromised in the fight against this new and deadly terrorist threat.