It has already been half a year since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place. Despite the quick successes of the war in Afghanistan, the government continues to warn us that the terrorist danger still looms large.

As every reader of this magazine knows, the attacks and the response to them profoundly affected business logistics. From the initial long delays at international borders to new and more stringent rules governing how freight can move, various obstacles have emerged that are forcing logistics and supply chain managers to rethink the way they do business, re-evaluate their sourcing and inventory strategies, and look harder at who is handling their freight and what measures are in place to prevent tampering while goods are out of their control.

Many companies have already looked into bringing production closer to home. In our story on Latin American logistics, beginning on page 53, Senior Editor Toby Gooley looks at whether South America's logistics infrastructure is prepared to handle growing demands created by businesses shifting production away from Asia in order to shorten the supply chain. Many of those efforts were under way before Sept. 11, but concerns over potential impediments to international shipping have brought new attention to that option.

Here at home, what worries me as the new rules and regulations take effect is that in the justifiable effort to make our transportation systems safer, we may find ourselves sacrificing liberties and privacy. That occurred to me again when I read that the American Trucking Associations would like some access to FBI records to use in employee background checks. Certainly, employers ought to know whom they are employing, but I wonder if allowing private businesses access to a government police agency's records may be going too far. The FBI has a less than stellar reputation for the quality of some of its records. More than that, however, while business and government ought to be partners in preventing terrorism, the rights and liberties we hold dearest should not be unduly compromised. When the attorney general of the United States suggests that criticism of the government abets terrorists, we are on dangerous ground.

None of that is to suggest that we should not take prudent measures to make our transportation system safer and less accessible to terrorists and their weaponry. The question we ought to ask, though, is whether any proposed restriction on liberty or on the free flow of goods can do the job it's purported to do, and whether it is worth the price. The problem is that in a robust global economy, in a nation as large and diverse as ours, we cannot eliminate every threat—not without a fundamental change in the principles on which our nation was founded that would not only be unwelcome and destructive, but probably impossible to achieve.