Threat Level is reporting that John McCain would continue the Bush administration’s policies of warrantless wiretapping. For the uninitiated: The NSA has conducted warrantless surveillance of Americans with the help of some telephone companies such as AT&T. I have previously blogged about whether AT&T should be retroactively granted immunity for the actions. McCain apparently now supports this type of action. McCain’s position on this topic hasn’t always been very clear. Cory Doctorow believes that this is pretty much exactly the kind of intrusion the founding fathers were hoping to avoid with that whole Constitution thing.

Personally, I think the politics are not as important as the technological concerns. Wiretapping isn’t as simple as it may seem and there are real technical challenges and security risks introduced by these systems. For example, every surveillance technique we use is a potential technique that our enemies could use against us. (The founding fathers might say that the government itself might use it against us.) For a detailed list of risks, I highly recommend reading the paper described by Matt Blaze in this post on wiretap risks.