The AP reports that the Education Department and FBI, in an effort labeled “Project Strike Back,” mined financial aid and enrollment data of approximately 14 million students over the past five years. Looking for “potential terrorist activity,” the FBI provided the department with what the bureau believed to be suspicious names to run through its databases. Jim Harper, a libertarian Cato Institute scholar who advises the Department of Homeland Security, asks, “Does the program address a genuine threat directly?” At this time of hard-to-pinpoint but nevertheless lethal terrorist activity, the justification for such a program hinges on the word “directly.” That is, does not the terrorist mode of war make it substantially more difficult for those in charge of protecting us to know exactly that the threat is clear and present – imminent? Despite limited knowledge of this specific case, one can nonetheless remark that the meaning of “clear, present, direct and imminent” danger needs to be revisited, and likely revised, if we are to survive this constantly shifting, Medusa-like lethal threat.