I stumbled across this article about wiretaps(well not really, since I read ars almost every day). However, I think this is something that anybody who uses a computer can read and understand. There is definitly a standing debate over which is more important: security vs. privacy, where people seem to think that by giving up some of our rights to privacy our law enforcement agencies can make us safer. The article makes some excellent points. I like to ride the fence on this one, on one hand if we're abiding by the laws we have nothing to fear of the government snooping on our lives. However, why should I believe that the people doing the snooping are any better than the people being snooped? If you really want to provide widespread coverage, that means a lot of personnel, and inevitably one of them is going to go bad. What then? There's definitly a line where people start to distrust the law simply because they become big brother. When people don't trust the law, they start to break the law.
See, this is why we should encrypt all of our communications. Yet, I don't... At least I have a PGP key though. BTW, you should install OTR support in your IM client. It's a nice IM encryption add-on.
What the article, and msot of the media, downplays is that this is only surveillance involving people who are suspected Al Qaeda operatives and the like. Moreover, even those are filtered down before they ever reach human eyes. If you look at it logically, there's not really much that can be abused.
There are a few problems with the article you link to (and/or his original post; I went through both and may comment on some things from the original). Most notably, he plays up HUMINT while downplaying COMINT/SIGINT/ELINT. While you won't find anybody remotely related to the intelligence community who thinks more human intelligence would be a bad idea, they don't just magically appear. HUMINT was cut 90% during the 1990's, and you can't rebuild it overnight. It takes more funding and more time to construct it effectively than it does to set up a program like the NSA one that is the subject of this controversy (which, incidently, I'd like to point out that it's not all that controversial -- you see lots of dems (primarily) complaining about it, but how many of them do you see calling for the program to be ceased?). Add to that the fact that Arabic and other languages involved are not a strong point, language-wise, for us, and that the college departments that teach it are incredibly hostile to using their graduates for intelligence purposes, and it only increases the difficulties.
He also mentions that the system can be thwarted, by talking in code or other means. Just because something can be thwarted doesn't mean it always will or that implementing it isn't a good idea. Locking your doors and windows won't prevent a burglar from entering your house, but does that make doing so an exercise in futility? More to the point, though, people do get sloppy. While they could talk in code, they often do not (many anecdotes exist in the intelligence community of people whose calls are being monitored saying "I really shouldn't be saying this over a[n unsecure] phone line" but then saying it anyways). As they monitor the media, I'm sure the sloppiness of the last couple months has been slim, but without somethign like that to remind them, you'd be surprised how careless people can be.
Oh, and in that article you added in a comment, I'd like to point out that it was an administrative worker. They don't have the same kind of security clearance and are not subjected to the same kind of background checks, among other things.
Re: the administrative worker, this is true, but the point still remains: Why does person A deserve more trust simply because they work for the gov't.
I'm not big on blindly trusting the government -- I am a Reaganesque conservative, after all ("Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem" and the like). Still, in that situation, I have considerably more trust in someone who has passed a fairly thorough background check over someone that we have been given reason to suspect has ties to al Qaeda (and, moreover, isn't listening in on every conversation, but merely those that have already passed through a couple layers of computer screening).