Steven Marsh makes a good point that I originally included in the previous post then deleted…
To those who argue, "If you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, you should have no problem with having your calls monitored," I note that "wrong" is in the eye of the beholder. One of the most telling examples from recent history were from McCarthyism, where people who had associated with others legally (either because it was before the 1940 passage of the Smith Act or because the people they had associated with weren't part of the Communist party until years later) were still forced to testify and account for those actions years later; lives were destroyed.
As a more nuts-and-bolts example, I suspect many of these people saying, "If you're not doing anything wrong…" still wouldn't want to be, say, audited on their taxes every year for the rest of their lives. Yet, why should they object? After all, if they're filing their taxes correctly, then they shouldn't have a problem having to disrupt their lives for a week or so every year, getting files together, making sure everything is documented so that another person can pore over it, etc. And, of course, they should be willing to pay whatever fees or penalties for filing incorrectly on the off chance that they have made a mistake within their half-inch of papers; after all, they obviously did something wrong in that case, right?
Yeah, I should have left in that I don't necessarily agree with the first part of that statement; that if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't be worried about having your calls monitored. Plenty of people in this country have their lives nuked by unfounded investigations that never prove wrongdoing or prove it only on the slimmest of technicalities. This is the reason we have that "probable cause" phrase in the Bill of Rights and so many laws. Authorities should not be able to go on fishing expeditions, prowling through your life in search of something they can twist into an indictment.
My father, as I've probably mentioned here, worked most of his life for the Internal Revenue Service, a job he hated to pieces. He was not involved with audits but he dealt often with people in his office who were. Much of the time, he thought they were fair and benevolent but there were periods — especially during the Nixon administration but only with regard to selected targets — that an auditor was told, in effect: "Nail this guy."
If you were that guy, there was no such thing as filing your taxes correctly. They would keep calling you in and demanding paperwork you couldn't possibly have and threatening to audit your friends and business associates the same way because of your association with them. They'd just scare the hell out of you until you gave in and accepted a plea bargain, paying a fine and maybe even admitting criminal guilt just to end the nightmare. The atmosphere in the department did not allow the auditor to go back to his superior and say, "I couldn't nail that guy. He's clean." So he'd keep you on the hook until you yelled "Uncle!" Of course, at the same time (this is still during the pre-Watergate Nixon era) they were letting their friends make millions a year, lie like hell on their taxes and get away with paying eleven dollars. That's the kind of thing that too often goes on in government departments that can operate without oversight and which assert a sole right to decide what's legal.
I can understand that some people are so fearful of another 9/11 that they're willing to let government officials do any damn thing they say they need to keep us safer. I think they're wrong — I think we'll be safer if those officials are a lot more accountable for any possible abuse of the system — but I understand the fear. What I don't understand is why when you say you want the spying programs to be subject to judicial review, they act like you're saying, "We must stop all intelligence gathering because my privacy is more important than stopping the next terrorist attack."