Observations Regarding Illegal Tapping

As much as I hate the idea of the government tapping phone lines, and as unconstitutional and illegal as it undoubtedly is, I'm not surprised that people seem resigned to it. When technology allows something to be accomplished (e.g., tapping), hurricanes of high-minded rhetoric will not be enough to stop it from happening. Technology trumps all. It's actually refreshing that the American people seem to be resisting the impulse to get up on their many soapboxes and fulminating about the injustice of it all.

Nevertheless, allowing the Administration - any Administration - to have unfettered, unsupervised capabilities in this area will lead directly to disaster, as it did during Watergate.

The potential for mischief, meanwhile, is large. Allegedly, the purpose of this phone records database is to search it with some kind of computer algorithm to somehow try to locate terrorists. Whether there is any sort of algorithm, or whether it works, or how it works nobody can say. And nothing in the current administration’s record inclines one to believe that something is true just because they say it’s true. After all, until last week there position was that there was no such database. Far and away the most obvious use for the information they’ve illegally attended is the much less high-minded one of pinpointing and persecuting leakers and whistleblowers -- see a story you don’t like show up in The New York Times and run a search to see which federal employees have made calls to Times employees or vice versa.

Politicians cannot resist the impulse to spy on their fellow politicians: it's crack cocaine to that class of folk. Why investigate bin Laden, when George Soros makes a much more immediate, and appealing subject?