I wrote back saying that I agreed, but as far as I knew, no one was building a machine to read minds just yet. I thought I was amusingly wry, but I was wrong, as she quickly informed me, because there are several projects doing just that at a low level with magnetic resonance imaging, and when something is physically possible in this new age, it gets done sooner rather than later. She forwarded me a quaint editorial piece from a science journal, which begged to reassure me that serious mind-reading wouldn’t be possible without invasive brain implants, and therefore—as no court would conceivably agree to such a thing—we need not fear an intrusion on our liberty from this source. I wondered in what world the author was living. In the wake of New York’s horror, it seemed to me, a person suspected of having advance knowledge of a similar outrage would be on the operating table before the judge had her wig on.