So, what we have is this. Someone who had access to anthrax, and the know-how to grow it up and refine it so that it would be highly deadly, remains at large. The letters were mailed from Trenton, New Jersey, so either that person lives in the country or at least had the ability to enter our borders. And, as far as we can tell, s/he (or, potentially, they) are still out there somewhere. In the meantime, a number of shortsighted approaches to security have been applied, such as this week's limitation on fluids in carry-on. As pointed out by Bruce Schneier,

Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won't make us safer, either. It's not just that there are ways around the rules, it's that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.

We need a severe overhaul, and we need to keep the unsolved anthrax attacks in the public eye. Someone out there has the technology to kill us--potentially, lots of us. We don't know when, where, or if he'll strike again, but the answer to the problem certainly isn't to react in a knee-jerk fashion. Instead of throwing a lot of money at problems without any rational underpinning for how it should be spent, we need to improve infrastructure--especially law enforcement and other emergency responders and public health--so that we can respond in a concerted and logical manner to threats like this.

Now that the Jon Benet Ramsay case has apparently been broken, perhaps we might look forward to some advances in the anthrax case? Maybe not -- according to Wikipedia:

As of 2006, the anthrax investigation seems to have gone cold. Authorities have traveled to four different continents, interviewed more than 8,000 individuals and have issued over 5,000 subpoenas. The number of FBI agents assigned to the case is now 21, ten fewer than a year ago. The number of postal inspectors investigating the case is nine.

The FBI and postal inspectors are in the process of preparing an internal report reviewing the history of the investigation. The report will include a list of "persons of interest" and the latest on the scientific tests used on the anthrax material. Investigators still have not determined the lab used to make the anthrax.

I've generally found that when the authorities start to enumerate, they're at a dead end.