Text of Gore speech, January 16, 2006

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

At barcamp, there was a kind of doofy guy who was arguing (more for the sake of argument, it seemed) that the G-man had the right to tap all international calls as an extension of the practice of x-raying your luggage or search you at the border. This is not a strong argument for two reasons:

1) There's an important difference between searching good and searching information. Searching information amounts to seizure, especially in a digital context. It's one thing to search a shipping container for drugs or plutonium (something we're currently not doing, BTW). It's quite another to read a letter. The contents of a communication, once searched by a government agent -- whether it's a secretary reading a letter or a server archiving an email -- has effectively been seized. The State is now in posession of that data.

2) You can make a case that this should be allowed, that the State should be a party to all international communications. That can be debated on fundimental merits, but what cannot be debated is the notion that this should be an informal process outside any legal channel without oversight, checks and balances. You cannot sustain a democracy if the State is allowed to secretly monitor the Public's communications with impunity.

Unfortunately, in spite of Al Gore's efforts and everything else, I'm not optimistic about the federal government. The Democratic Party is not an organized enough institution to effectively defeat the GOP, even in their scandal-plagued state. Retaking congress, the only real hope for checking the Bush administration's abuses of power, is unlikely from a mechanical perspective. Furthermore, it's unclear that the individual personalities who would attain positions of authority should such an unlikely event come to pass would have the political will to resist the Bush agenda, much less launch the necessary investigation of past abuses. The performance of the Senate Democrats around the Alito hearings has been extremely dissapointing.

There's still a narrow window of opportunity for things to change, but the lack of any real leadership among the Democratic Party makes it unlikely the institution will focus and act in time to sieze the moment.