Abuse of Power?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/21/harman.wiretap/index.html

Democratic Representative Jane Harman's outrage towards being wiretapped back in 2005/2006 has again sparked a debate on Capitol Hill about the legality of wiretapping and the Patriot Act. She claims that the NSA monitoring of her conversations with an alleged Israeli agent was a gross abuse of power. While the actual legality of that practice is still very vague and up to the interpretation of the Patriot Act, the more important issue is the monitoring of government officials. Rep. Harman claims that she never knew that the government monitored her actions.

In this specific inident, she was acting in her capacity as a representative for the United States of america in her dealing with an alleged Israeli agent. Thus the NSA was not monitoring Jane Harman, they were overseeing a representative of the government making deals with an alleged agent for a freindly nation. The government was overseeing is own people that were actiong on its behalf. So in regards to this specific incident, nothing is "secret" when your acting in a capacity that gives you the bargaining power of an entire nation. Her conversations had to be documented to maintain a log of the events in that specific dealing.

This incident also brings up the old argument of the limits of the American Government's power. Special interest groups and lobbyists have jumped on this issue taking the oppurtunity to champion the privacy of citizens from their government. While this case is seemingly a clean cut case of national security, these groups are still trying to make a case to speciffically limit the governments capacity to monitor those that it protects. While innocent people have nothing to hide, some argue that it is the principle of the matter that is at stake. That if we surrender our privacy to the government, what else is next? However, if a call was intercepted and that information was used in the thwarting of an attack, there would be very little upheaval about that use of power.

The fact is that since there is so much information out there, we cannot set lilitations to what can be monitored and what cannot be. In order to detect the very very few trails that threats to national security leave behind we must allow the government to monitor it all. Nobody will argue that the would surrender their safety for their privacy, therefore this is a matter of the efficiency of this method. But the fact of the matter is that small freedoms must be surrendered in order to serve the greater good of the nation and if this means that the government has the power to listen to you dealing with potential Israeli agents, then so be it.