Dear listeners and readers, We appreciate your thoughtful comments, positive and negative.

Just a few more words of our own to help put our reports in perspective: We understand and appreciate that since 9/11, U.S. leaders and the public have wrestled with a dilemma: how does the nation protect itself from terrorists and protect whats at the heart of Americas democracy? How does the nation investigate possible terrorists and protect civil liberties and human rights? Many legal and security specialists agree that its a difficult and fragile balance. We investigated the Mall of Americas private counter-terrorism program, and the larger trend of suspicious activity reporting, specifically to shine a spotlight on that balancing act. Why only the Malls program, and not others? As we explained in our stories, its because their suspicious activity reports were the only ones we were able to obtain. Do those reports necessarily mean that security units at other sites, from Amtrak stations to sports stadiums, identify and question and report suspicious persons in the same way? No. But the Mall of America is a nationally famous site, and its security program has been held up as a model, so its a good microcosm to study. If there are problems or drawbacks with the Malls program, as the evidence suggests, there are likely to be similar problems and drawbacks with other programs although that will take more reporting to flesh out. Some listeners and readers have worried that our stories will somehow jeopardize national security, by giving away secrets about suspicious activity reporting. We asked executives at the Mall of America to talk with us about the suspicious persons we profiled, and we asked the Bloomington police and FBI as well, to give them a chance to argue that those people merited investigating and reporting. The Mall, the police and the FBI all declined, even though the suspicious people themselves signed waivers giving officials permission to talk with us about their personal information. If authorities believed that any of those suspicious persons were potential threats and that profiling them would jeopardize security programs, they had many opportunities to tell us and they could have redacted information in the reports they considered sensitive (remember: we obtained those records under state open records law requests). In fact, law enforcement officials frequently try to persuade the media to withhold news stories, on the

grounds that they could jeopardize secret investigations and law enforcement efforts. And the media often comply. But none of the executives at the Mall or law enforcement officials made that argument. We hope our reports on the Mall of America prompt other media and publicspirited groups to continue the debate.