To the Daily:

Well, here we are again. It' almost a year later, and the feds are once again thinking of knocking on Jake Baker's door. His case is especially important right now, since another threat to American freedom of expression has happened at Cal Tech, where a student was recently expelled from school for harassment of an ex-girlfriend over e-mail.

I guess if our email is going to be monitored, everything else must be too, to be fair. So, welcome to the age of Big Brother. Wire taps on phones must be commonplace, so that we can prevent anything that someone might deem offensive from being transmitted over state lines via phone line. That would be a federal offense, now wouldn't it? I have a feeling that many in Congress who create and pass shortsighted laws such as the ones that caused Jake Baker to be met at class by cops would feel uneasy if their late night 900-number phone calls were monitored. Aren't there phone lines that feature baby-voiced women? Isn't that a form of child porn? Why aren't those forms of "expression" being similarly monitored?

We'll have to burn books too, and have each new work of literature go through a rigorous screening process with an ethics committee. Aren't books often transmitted over state lines? That would mean that creating anything that was offensive to anyone a federal crime.

So, I guess great author Phillip Roth would go to jail. His new book "Sabbath's Theater" has a scene where a professor has phone sex with a student. Who else would go to jail? Most crime fiction writers, many talk show hosts, and many of us, who express ourselves by partaking of such forms of entertainment. And who would be left? Those overzealous legislators who put us in jail, still sneaking off late at night to sneak a call to 1-900-BIGONES.

Come on, everyone. It's expression. As in the Cal Tech case, it may be real-life expression, but it really is no one's business, unless the girl was being physically stalked. The case may deserve attention if the girl feels harassed, but the guy doesn't need to be expelled from school for it. Think of the reasoning in the Jake Baker case: The feds think "OK, this guy's probably a little unbalanced, so let's harass him, make a big media circus out of the whole thing, get him kicked out of school, send him to prison, then send him back to rural Ohio where can really go nuts!!!"

Oh boy. Gotta watch what I say. I'm sending this letter over e-mail.

Joy A. Burnett

LSA senior