"The Internal Security Act of 1950, somtimes called the McCarran Act or the anticommunist law, is one of the most controversial and least understood laws in the history of the republic. Yet it is of high importance that Americans understand it, since it involves (1) our national safety and (2) individual liberties." So began Beverly Smith's inquiry "How Will Our Laws Against Traitors Work?" which appeared in the January 13, 1951, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. The Internal Security Act, popularly named for Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran, an aging hack who, in fact, commandeered the legislation from an earlier version by congressmen Karl Mundt and (of all people) Richard Nixon argued for the fingerprinting and registration of all "subversives" at large in the United States. As the SEP article reports, the act's passage by House and Senate was quite controversial. President Tr uman, who had himself imposed the Loyalty Order for federal government employees in 1947, immediately vetoed it, on the grounds that it "would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights [and] would actually weaken our internal security measures." But his veto w as overridden by a humbling 89 percent majority vote, and McCarran's newly formed Senate Internal Security Subcommittee working closely with Hoover's FBI set up shop and conducted hearings for the next twenty�seven years. One of the more bucolic provisi ons of the McCarran Act was its authorization of concentration camps "for emergency situations."