Salon - Obama’s wiretap America

Did the surveillance state just take another gigantic Big Brotherish step forward? The New York Times and Washington Post are reporting that the Obama administration is planning to support an FBI plan for “a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services.” Facebook posts, Skype calls, Google chats, Apple’s iMessage — under the new plan, every form of Internet communication would have to be accessible to law enforcement wiretapping. Civil libertarians, Internet companies and privacy activists are all understandably unenthused. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure, chiefly by requiring that search warrants be authorized by a judge and supported by probable cause. According to all descriptions of the new FBI wiretapping plan, if law enforcement wants to listen in on your Facebook chats or Apple iMessages, law enforcement will have to get a court order, just at it would if it wants to wiretap your phone. If society is going to grant government the right to listen in to our old-school phone conversations, it’s hard to see how, in principle, it can deny the same right with regard to our Skype calls. The more pertinent question is whether we can trust our government to responsibly seek those court orders, once it is armed with a massive expansion in surveillance power. The evidence there is not encouraging. On the same day that the news broke of the Obama administration’s plan to support expanded wiretapping capabilities, CNET’s Declan McCullagh reported that, according to documents obtained by the ACLU, the U.S. Department of Justice just doesn’t believe that it needs search warrants “to review Americans’ e-mails, Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, and other private files.” Now we’re talking violation of the Fourth Amendment. And if we combine that kind of cavalier attitude toward our constitutionally mandated protections with vastly expanded technical surveillance capabilities, then we’ve got a real problem. Civil libertarians have a right to be nervous. Expanded power implies expanded opportunities to abuse that power...more