You could almost hear the nationwide giggles this month when word reached the media that several FBI offices had their wiretaps shut down because they failed to pay the bills of their phone companies.
It's not funny.
The FBI is after criminals, of course. But into that category also fall searches conducted for national security: taps of people suspected of connections to terrorists.
The legal authority of Homeland Security officials, acting in the name of the White House, to conduct such searches and taps on mere suspicion and without legal warrant - our Constitutional protections against being illegally spied upon by government - is highly controversial, to say the least.
The White House has assured telecom carriers that, until the courts settle everything, they can conduct security taps in secret, without warrants called for under the FISA laws, on the say-so of presidential authority.
There are, as part of the controversy, strong legal arguments over whether the president really has such authority.
The Congress has given its general acquiescence for the taps to continue at the wish of the White House - but only temporarily - under the rubric of the six-month-old Protect America Act. But one of the questions that remains unanswered by that Act is, if such actions do turn out to be unlawful under the Constitution, can the carriers be held legally liable? Can they, in other words, be sued?
A Senate bill brought to the floor last month from that body's Intelligence Committee would have answered that by changing the FISA laws themselves, to grant protection against lawyers to the carriers retroactively.
Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, campaigning at the time in the Iowa caucuses, was exercised enough to leave the stump, return to Washington, and threaten to personally block the bill on the basis of its immunity provision. The legislation was pulled from a floor vote as a result.
"I can't think of an issue that's been more important," Dodd told the media at the time. "We just can't continue to allow this (possibly illegal wiretapping) to continue."
This may seem like nattering over a technicality. However in effect it is about protecting not the wallets of the telephone companies, but the inalienable right of liberty endowed by our Creator and in need of the defense of eternal vigilance. That much seems plain.
Yet still more lies behind it. Elsewhere in the media, we learn that cell-phone service providers can now technically track the location of any user of a cellphone, to within 30 feet. Whether at an airport, a shopping mall, or at home.
"Most people don't realize it," the Washington Post quoted one expert as saying, "but they're carrying a tracking device in their pocket ... Cell phones can reveal very precise information about your location, and yet legal protections are very much up in the air."
Still, unless you're a terrorist, why should you care?
Because, as the AP reported elsewhere, "Americans are finally using cell phones ... in embracing data services such as text messaging (and other Internet services)."
And to take that another arresting step further, the advertising industry now wants to marry what the cell operators can tell them about you and your location, with what data-mining services can assemble for them about you: details of your spending, dining, entertainment and income patterns, to target messages not just to your phone, but to your interests and needs at any precise moment: "Just arrived at the airport?" says a message on your cell. "Call an ACME cab to your side right now by pushing the pound sign! And dine and stay at the AJAX Hotel! Press the dollar sign for reservations."
Maybe that would bother you, maybe not.
But just think of the 'tail' of all of your digital records: text messages, your Internet searches and e-mail messages, tapped phone conversations, credit-card purchases, bank records, court files down to divorces and even traffic tickets, that a foot-loose, fancy-free and unrestrained-by-previously-necessary-warrants government could access without any authorizations at all. To become your true and digitally instantaneous Big Brother!
So, was then-candidate Dodd merely grandstanding for the Iowa voters? Perhaps.
But as both sides to the warrants issue are acutely aware, the reality is that tort cases against telecom companies, whether brought by their customers or by the ACLU, can lead to many unforeseen revelations. And those in turn can lead to class-action suits, in which discovery can and may well lead right up to and inside the White House.
Where lawyers can discover just who the government is really spying on. For reasons of national security, or for - whatever.
Not because, that is, the FBI or the Justice Department or Homeland Security - or even eventually the IRS, those tough G-man who nailed Capone - really needs to.
But just because they can.
• Robert Cutts is a career journalist who has been a news reporter, magazine writer and editor, author of two nonfiction books and a college journalism teacher. He lives in Gardnerville and Japan.