There's a letter responding to Safire's column about hedge funds in today's New York Times. I actually had a chance to read the original, uncut version of this letter last week. It makes some good points.

Just to clarify, the "disclosure" that Safire and Bill Donaldson have been recommending would require all hedge funds to register as investment advisers with the SEC. (About a third of them already do so.) Being an investment adviser isn't especially burdensome; it requires a firm to file an annual questionnaire with the SEC with extremely general information about its investment objectives and techniques, and to be subject to an occasional audit wherein government regulators poke around the company for a few days looking for anything that seems amiss. These audits are very occasional; my company has been registered for years, and I don't think we've ever had an audit. In any case, it's hard to see how this would serve as much of a deterrent to the sort of fraudulent or illegal activity that Safire mentions.