I haven’t said much of anything about the wiretap scandal in part because I’m hoping the President will just fess up and ask Congress for the authorization he needs. It seems like a relatively small step and something he should’ve done anyway. If you want some legal analysis of the whole issue, Volokh has a great piece by Orin Kerr looking at the issues. More troubling to me, though, is that the President seems insistent that he doesn’t need to follow the law at all, specifically FISA. The administration has also acted in a way that indicates that they knew they were in conflict with the law. But because of political issues or because it would’ve taken some serious legal work to craft an appropriate statute, they decided they just didn’t want to deal with it and decided to ignore the law.

I still want to find out more before I say much of anything. I’m keeping my mind open on this because the type of pattern analysis and broad data gathering could have value that is unique and not replaceable with other surveillance techniques. While I’m inherently uncomfortable with this type of monitoring especially without a strong legal framework and conducted by this administration, I’m not sure we don’t need something like it.

At the end of the day, my main concern is that the administration follow the law and work with our system of government to do things the right way. That’s all that I’m are concerned about. The ACLU captures the problem well in these ads they’ve taken out in the New York Times:

You can find the ad (including larger versions and PDFs) here and the first ad they ran here.