21st Centry Wiretapping

Ed Felton is posting a series of thoughtful articles on wiretapping at Freedom to Tinker.

So government will have greater eavesdropping capabilities and, more interestingly, it will have different capabilities. How should we respond? Surely it is not right simply to let government do whatever it wants — this has never been our policy. Nor can it be right to let government do no wiretapping at all — this has not been our policy either. What we need to understand is where to draw the line, and what kind of oversight and safeguards we need to keep our government near the line we have drawn.