As the FBI sees it, the problem is that people are moving away from traditional communication systems like telephones onto computer systems like Skype. Eavesdropping on telephones used to be easy. The FBI would call the phone company, which would bring agents into a switching room and allow them to literally tap the wires with a pair of alligator clips and a tape recorder. In the 1990s, the government forced phone companies to provide an analogous capability on digital switches; but today, more and more communications happens over the Internet.
What the FBI wants is the ability to eavesdrop on everything. …Bruce Schneier, FP
But we already figured that’s inevitable, didn’t we?
___
On the other hand, Obama is nominating a Nazi-fighting hero to head the FBI.
By choosing Mr. [James B.] Comey, a Republican, Mr. Obama made a strong statement about bipartisanship at a time when he faces renewed criticism from Republicans in Congress and has had difficulty winning confirmation of some important nominees. At the same time, Mr. Comey’s role in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Bush administration — in which he refused to acquiesce to White House aides and reauthorize a program for eavesdropping without warrants when he was serving as acting attorney general — should make him an acceptable choice to Democrats. …NYT
Oh yes. Comey stood up to our truly shameless, vice president — Dick Cheney — during that authoritarian administration’s efforts to expand wiretapping.
In the 2004 episode that defined Mr. Comey’s time in the Bush administration, the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, and Mr. Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., sought to persuade Attorney General John Ashcroft — who was hospitalized and disoriented — to reauthorize the administration’s controversial eavesdropping program.
Mr. Comey, who was serving as the acting attorney general and had been tipped off that Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card were trying to go around him, rushed to Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room to thwart them. With Mr. Comey as well as Mr. Mueller in the room, Mr. Ashcroft refused to reauthorize the program. Mr. Bush later agreed to make changes in the program, and Mr. Comey was widely praised for putting the law over politics.
According to testimony Mr. Comey provided to Congress in 2007, Mr. Ashcroft rose weakly from his hospital bed when Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Card approached and refused to approve the program.
“I was angry,” Mr. Comey said in his testimony. “I had just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me. I thought he had conducted himself in a way that demonstrated a strength I had never seen before, but still I thought it was improper.”…NYT
___
So now we have the elements of a little Obama mystery. We have the potential for a bipartisan nomination of a law-abiding Republican who stood up to law-breaking Republicans being considered by the current generation of law-breaking Republicans in Congress (that’s going to be interesting). And we have in Comey a hero to many liberals who will finding himself presiding over an FBI that’s looking to expand its eavesdropping powers again. Is this a cynical or a brilliant move on the part of our occasionally inscrutable President Obama?