The Warrantless Debate Over Wiretapping
22nd August 2007
NYT. Surprising to see sense appearing in the Times. Of course, it’s an op-ed contributor rather than one of the Times’ own editorials, so I guess it’s just a Token Grown-Up thing.
For this purpose, warrants are utterly beside the point. As Judge Richard Posner has put it, “once you grant the legitimacy of surveillance aimed at detection rather than at gathering evidence of guilt, requiring a warrant to conduct it would be like requiring a warrant to ask people questions or to install surveillance cameras on city streets.” Warrants, which originate in the criminal justice paradigm, provide a useful standard for surveillance designed to prove guilt, not to learn the identity of people who may be planning atrocities.
A lot of people forget that the Fourth Amendment applies only in the domestic criminal context, not to espionage or other matters related to intelligence-gathering.
It’s also fairly amusing when the people who are most up in arms about “government snooping” don’t seem to mind when it’s in pursuit of some program they like.