Bugging the minds of the paranoid

Eugene Robinson:

Several times a month, a woman calls my office in the middle of the night and leaves long voice-mail messages about how she's the target of a vast, sinister conspiracy. I won't give her name -- obviously, she suffers from a mental illness. The conspiracy she perceives involves the U.S. military, the CIA, interference with her brain waves and constant monitoring by the evil people who, for whatever reason, have decided that her thoughts somehow threaten their nefarious plans. Sometimes she disguises her voice and pretends to be a lieutenant in the heroic resistance against mind control.

She always seems upbeat and energized, and I think I understand why: This must be a great time to be a paranoid.

People with a tendency to imagine that they are constantly being watched now have evidence to support their delusions. This weekend, when Congress legalized the Bush administration's practice of eavesdropping on citizens' international phone calls and e-mail without first seeking court warrants, my occasional caller must have said to her imaginary lieutenant, "See, I told you so."

My purpose here is not to endorse paranoia, and I'm not even going to blast the White House for further eroding our traditional guarantees of privacy. Well, maybe I'll blast the White House and Congress just a little: I'm as anxious as the next guy to catch terrorists before they strike, but what's wrong with having at least a fig leaf of judicial oversight? Why is it so onerous to have the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court continue to rubber-stamp eavesdropping requests, even retroactively?

...

Uh, Eugene, the FISA court was not rubber-stamping eavesdropping requests, it was denying them to the point we were unable to listen to enemy communications in Pakistan that were routed through US hubs. I think Robinson's paranoid message dropper is actually a pretty good metaphor for the Democrat opposition to what should have been a widely supported dose of sanity on the issue.

I want the NSA to monitor every al Qaeda call that it can, and I especially want them to monitor al Qaeda calls to someone in the US. I don't want the FISA court or anyone else interfering with access to monitoring those calls, even if by chance a terrorist tried to call me. In fact, if they did try to call me, the first thing I would do is call the FBI an tell them about the contact in hopes that it would help them find the terrorist. My mind is at ease on that perceived threat to privacy. It is more than passing strange that Democrats have such concerns. Has Robinson tried to trace that mystery caller to see if it is from the DNC?