From today’s Wall Street Journal (subscriber link):
As the son of a U.S. aid worker stationed in Guatemala during the 1970s civil war, Alex Joel recalls being unable to tell the good guys from the bad as both armed soldiers and civilians alike would order his family out of their car to search it.
Those first-hand brushes with totalitarianism, says Mr. Joel, have led him to take the rights of individuals very seriously. Given that he was recently named as the first civil-liberties protection officer for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, such talk is reassuring to privacy advocates.
Mr. Joel’s appointment to his new role, in fact, is one of several steps the Bush administration is taking to soothe concerns about civil liberties. Under siege for compromising privacy rights, most recently because of a National Security Agency program to monitor communications between people in the U.S. and overseas terrorist suspects, the administration is creating several privacy-related posts at government agencies.[...]
When the NSA wiretapping program began, Mr. Joel wasn’t working for the intelligence office, but he says he has reviewed it and finds no problems. The classified nature of the agency’s surveillance work makes it difficult to discuss, but he suggests that fears about what the government might be doing are overblown.
Let’s just ignore the apparent fact that the NSA wiretapping program is at best of questionable legality to begin with….
At this stage in the game, I have to admit that I have little faith in Washington’s willingness to protect individuals’ privacy rights. However, maybe a miracle has happened, and someone’s finally decided that there needs to be a balance between privacy rights and national security.