Reach Out and Tap Someone

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.
"Officials Push to Bolster Law on Wiretapping"

Nobody knows who invented the telephone, but whoever did probably didn't worry about whether the government would be able to listen in on phone calls.

When we read news like the article quoted above, we start to sympathize with the Tea Party. Don't get us wrong: We want the government to have the ability to spy on. . .well, spies. We just find something slightly Stalinist in the fact that governments require any advancements in communication technology to be "tappable." If untappable phone lines are outlawed, then only outlaws will have untappable phone lines. And that's the point, isn't it? We sincerely doubt that Osama bin Laden subscribes to a "Friends and Family" plan (although we suspect Mullah Omar would be in his "Five"). We assume sophisticated terrorists know how to avoid most electronic surveillance anyway; and since the Mossad has proven adept at rigging cellphones to explode when answered, we suspect al-Qaeda and its ilk often opt to avoid the devices altogether.

We find it ironic that our government seeks to stifle an innovation that it would presumably applaud in the hands of, say, North Korean dissidents. We hate to think that Verizon engineers, when trying to improve telecommunication services, are hobbling themselves out of fear that whatever they come up with will prove resistant to government surveillance. Frankly, we wish they would just focus on eliminating dropped calls.