SWNID Is Back: The Bush Wiretaps

Since the Iraqi election was a success and Rumsfeld has announced troop reductions to begin soon, the Left has lost its issues. But always ready to come to the rescue, the NY Times published leaks of Bush administration warrantless wiretaps.

Bill Kristol has dropped his usual detached style to write about this one with passion. We will summarize a few points, give a pemmican quotation, and then make a couple of points of our own.

• The so-called wiretaps amounted to computer screening of myriads of mobile phone conversations between the United States and foreign countries. High speed computers filtered these for words and phrases that could point to terrorist activity so that analysts could concentrate on real leads. This is technology and procedure that is well beyond the ability of the FISA judges to review for warrants. And it's also well beyond what could easily be used to harass political opponents or otherwise oppress the innocent.
• General Michael Hayden, former National Security Agency director, has stated to the press that this procedure yielded information not available otherwise that thwarted actual terrorist plots.
• Democrats have gone into a hissy fit about "the constitution in crisis" in response.

To quote Kristol (and modesty forbids us to point out that we've been saying this since this blog began):

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.

Now, our own points:

• Our current free-time reading (and we have actual free time this blessed week) is David McCullough's Truman. Among the many things of which this book reminds the reader is that during World War II, J. Edgar Hoover wiretapped all kinds of phones around Washington, ostensibly for national security reasons, and sent reports to FDR, mostly about what the wiretaps revealed about the sexual proclivities of Roosevelt's political opponents. We note that Roosevelt's heroic profile still graces the dime, the very coin for which the victims of the Great Depression begged their "brother" to "spare" during the vaunted Democrat's administration. Hoover and FDR were not doing right, of course, but the indifference that their actions met in the 1940s demonstrates the constantly rising standards of "privacy" that leftists and libertarians demand as "constitutional."
• The ability to process millions of cell phone calls and emails through high speed computers to find potentially dangerous messages was developed by the CIA and Defense Department in the 1990s, under that President whose wife we hear so much about these days. Meanwhile, neither party did anything to develop with legislation or even a constitutional amendment a means ensuring that the technology could be used to protect public safety and national security while at the same time protecting citizens from unwarranted searches and seizures. It's high time that someone did, not as a "gotcha" for Bush but as a means of getting the laws in touch with the times.