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Wednesday, December 21, 2005Privacy and Government Wiretapping: The Government should keep wiretapping illegally.Mickey Kaus says that what the latest "illegal wiretapping" scandal shows is that we need to lower the bar on wiretapping. This is one of those places where his earnest liberalism shows through. A smart conservative, as opposed to an earnest liberal (and, perhaps, the Bushies) knows the value of hypocrisy. There is a value in honoring things in the breach. Even if you are to ignore or violate a principle, that doesn't mean you have to unaware of or dismissive of it. Mickey Kaus' solution is not a solution - it is an outright weakening of privacy protections. The Bush administration's actions may violate those protections, but they don't weaken them in principle because they are approached in an extralegal manner dependent upon the idea that the point is to fight a war. The problem with Mickey's approach is that it opens the door for the government to further push its idiotic drug war and more while creating explicit pathways for doing so. The beauty of the Bush approach is that with the outrage it engenders, anything they act on better be both damn actionable and damn critical. In Mickey's approach, the Feds can pick up granny calling and vowing to bring her knitting along on the flight by sticking it in the bottom of her bag, and a court may seriously be asked to legitimate the government's actions. With Bush's extralegal program, if they act on information about anything other than terrorism, there are serious associated political costs. Perhaps I'm the only one, but I would much rather have my communications monitored by the NSA as part of a massive anti-terrorism program than have the Justice Department John Ashcroft use to run be given any broadened authority. If I were to e-mail - hypothetically speaking - about the cool CD I'd ripped for a friend, I'm relatively assured that the NSA/NRO 1) won't give a damn and 2) won't want to get in trouble for messing with privacy rights over it. A Justice Department trying to win over Orrin Hatch for funding, on the other hand, might just push things if they found out I was distributing free copies of the SpyKids 2 soundtrack through a server in Germany but via a U.S. ISP. Bottom line: The NSA monitoring communications relevant to terrorism in order to gather information that probably isn't actionable in court but could be useful in deciding who our forces need to shoot is hunky dory by me, as it protects me from terrorists without subjecting me to the government powers from which the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect me. Loosened rules where the courts and Justice Department can dig deeper, increasing the degree to which government can intrude other than to prevent against clear and present threats isn't. Call it the pragmatic libertarian take. 
posted by gbarto at 11:13 PM |
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