Greetings. Little noticed amongst wall-to-wall coverage of the Minneapolis bridge disaster is another drama of a different sort, as the Senate voted yesterday, and the House today, for an expansion of warrantless wiretapping authority demanded by the Bush administration. (Please see this Washington Post article for more details.)

A key demand fulfilled in the legislation (which has been written so that the authority may be reconsidered in six months) involves wiretapping of voice and data that merely transits the United States, rather than necessarily having endpoints here. Given the topology of voice and especially Internet networks, this opens up a vast range of materials to surveillance by an administration that has already shown itself to be ethically bankrupt when it comes to the appropriate handling of such powers.

Be that as it may, the ultimate irony in the situation is that such moves are likely to have the unintended consequence of speeding the pace at which such surveillance techniques become ineffective against the real bad guys.

Increasingly, the people we'd really like to catch -- especially at higher levels -- are assuming that their telecommunications are being monitored, and moving increasingly to heavily encrypted communications, steganographic obfuscation techniques, and other mechanisms to protect their communications.

This leaves the communications of ordinary, innocent persons open to broad snooping from governmental or other entities, especially in the wake of the sorts of sweeping "vacuum cleaner" data collection techniques and surveillance mistargeting that we know takes place (e.g., mass diversion of backbone Internet traffic) despite the administration's continuing attempts to block information about its ultimate extent.

Most of us rarely encrypt our communications since (a) we don't usually feel an obvious need to do so, and (b) truly automatic and easy to use crypto mechanisms have yet to be widely deployed. "What do I say that anyone would care to listen to?" is a common refrain, but it's never certain which harmless statements today might be considered "actionable" in a new context tomorrow.

If we had complete faith that our leaders would not abuse the wiretapping powers provided to them, this would be more of an academic discussion than anything else. Unfortunately, both long-term and recent history show that abuses of such surveillance systems are an endemic part of their structure.

That some actionable intelligence is still derived from wiretapping tradecraft is undeniable. But the diminishing value of this information given the rise in encryption use among the primarily targeted groups, suggests that the abuse potential of this form of surveillance increasingly outweighs its legitimate usefulness. This makes the necessity of tight judicial and congressional oversight even more important -- not less.

Congress should resist administration efforts to diminish or marginalize such oversight -- in fact the oversight needs to be greatly strengthened. Even putting aside serious misgivings about the current administration, we should rightly be concerned about how future administrations could abuse wiretapping tools and authorities granted to them.

Fighting crime and terrorism is a worthy goal, but so is preserving the hard-fought rights that we're ultimately trying to protect. To do the former without the latter is to undermine the very foundations of what makes this country great.

--Lauren--