Terrorism prevention?

Austan comments on my recent post, How Exactly did the System Fail, on Faisal Shahzad:

the system of prevention failed while the system of apprehension worked…and those are two different systems.

I am going to say something few of our elected officials have the courage to say: a free society must make trade-offs between security and civil liberties. While there is no clear line – that is for democracies to solve themselves – you can’t have a police state and a democracy. I don’t know if we can do terrorism prevention (I have my doubts), but I am certain that a robust terrorism prevention policy can’t exist in a democracy.