Getting beyond my personal opinions on the newest disclosures of the NSA’s monitoring of personal phone usage (an illegal political disaster), I’m more amazed daily at the people who justify it solely on the basis of it being essential for the War on Terror™. Like the various exceptions to the Fourth Amendment for the War on Drugs™ and the entire RICO monstrosity for the War on Organized Crime™, my thoughts go to a certain small mouse who broke the rules to create a magic broom that helped clean up the Sorceror’s workshop. His purposes were noble, if slightly self-centered, but he created something he didn’t understand and had no means to control.

With the Department of Justice unable to get permission from the NSA to conduct oversight of the NSA, and Congress having no investigative teeth or spine at all, we’re left to the whims of various leakers to break the law and advise journalistic powerhouses like USA Today of their concerns.

Regardless of how one feels about President Bush, this isn’t about him. I doubt he has a terminal for the database, and even if he did he probably lost the sticky with the password Cheney gave him. This is about his minions, the people who actually have access to the database. Just as some bureaucrats break the law to “do the right thing” and leak classified information, others may “do the right thing” with their access and power for other reasons. With no oversight, how will we know when someone wants to start tracking talk-show callers or monitoring independent telephone pollsters? How quickly could Nixon’s friends have solved his problem of Deep Throat with a quick correlation between some Washington Post and government employee phone numbers? What will the next President’s allies do with the database when reporters start telephoning White House staffers about the First Husband’s newest bimbos?

Collecting the information wouldn’t be the main problem, even if it were legal, but as with other technologies, the issue is with the use. Even those who blindly follow Bush through the War on Terror should be having some concern with how the system will be used when he leaves office in 2009.

This is where the gun nuts have it right. Registration is a problem because the databases created can’t be controlled. Backdoors, hacks or just good old fashioned do-gooders will muck up even things as straightforward as a 200-year-old constitutional protection.

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