Bruce Schneier, secu­ri­ty expert extra­or­di­naire, writes Uncle Sam is lis­ten­ing:

The fun­da­men­tal issue here [in the spy­ing scan­dal] is secu­ri­ty, but it’s not the secu­ri­ty most peo­ple think of. James Madi­son famous­ly said: “If men were angels, no gov­ern­ment would be nec­es­sary. If angels were to gov­ern men, nei­ther exter­nal nor inter­nal con­trols on gov­ern­ment would be nec­es­sary.” Ter­ror­ism is a seri­ous risk to our nation, but an even greater threat is the cen­tral­iza­tion of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal pow­er in the hands of any sin­gle branch of the government.

Over 200 years ago, the framers of the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion estab­lished an inge­nious secu­ri­ty device against tyran­ni­cal gov­ern­ment: they divid­ed gov­ern­ment pow­er among three dif­fer­ent bod­ies. A care­ful­ly thought out sys­tem of checks and bal­ances in the exec­u­tive branch, the leg­isla­tive branch, and the judi­cial branch, ensured that no sin­gle branch became too powerful.

This is about secu­ri­ty. I’d be as worked up if Bill Clin­ton did it. I remem­ber the way Clin­ton’s Clip­per encryption/key escrow sys­tem was shot down, and right­ly so. Peo­ple thought it was sil­ly to have an encryp­tion sys­tem where the gov­ern­ment had all the keys and the encryp­tion algo­rithm was secret. It was bad policy.

In talk­ing with Katie Couric this morn­ing, Alber­to “Bind, Tor­ture, Kill” Gon­za­les first said the Pres­i­dent did­n’t need Con­gres­sion­al approval, then lat­er sug­gest­ed that they did­n’t ask Con­gress because Con­gress would­n’t approve. There’s a con­tra­dic­tion there, and it goes to the heart of Schneier’s point.

He spec­u­lates, expand­ing on DefenseTech’s the­o­ry, that Bush ordered NSA to turn Ech­e­lon inward. Ech­e­lon is a mas­sive search engine for pret­ty much all the phone calls, emails, and oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tions that NSA and oth­er mem­bers of the UK-USA alliance inter­cept. It scoops up every­thing pos­si­ble, then tries to fil­ter out the inter­est­ing parts. If that’s true, every inter­na­tion­al call with an Amer­i­can par­tic­i­pant was fed into Ech­e­lon, every call I made to Ms. TfK, ever call we made to her fam­i­ly abroad, every call to friends over­seas, every call I made home when vis­it­ing Europe, has been sucked into NSA’s gap­ing maw, with no leg­isla­tive safeguards.

Run­ning things through a com­put­er­ized search like this rais­es com­plex legal issues, and I’m sure leg­isla­tive author­i­ty could be arranged for this pro­gram, with appro­pri­ate safe­guards and over­sight, if this is what hap­pened. I think that could be done in an accept­able way. But it vio­lates both the spir­it and let­ter of exist­ing law, and I want the Peep­ing Tom in Chief to do jail time for that.