Although wiretapping goes back to the early days of the telegraph, Congress did not get around to giving law-enforcement officials statutory authority to engage in such snooping until last year. The Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968 expressly legalized electronic eavesdropping for the first time in investigations of such serious crimes as treason, robbery and murder—provided the authorities first obtain a court warrant. During his presidential campaign, Richard Nixon said that he would take full advantage of the new law—a promise that raised fears of a massive invasion of privacy.
To calm those fears, the Administration last week issued what amounted to an official statement on the subject. In his first news conference since becoming the President's chief legal officer, Attorney General John N. Mitchell pointedly announced that the incidence of wiretapping by federal law enforcement agencies had gone down, not up, during the first six months of Republican rule. Mitchell refused to disclose any figures, but he indicated that the number was far lower than most people might think. "Any citizen of this United States who is not involved in some illegal activity," he added, "has nothing to fear whatsoever."
Congressional Bugs. Mitchell's assurances were not entirely convincing. It has long been common knowledge that the Government listened in regularly on the telephone conversations of Teamsters Boss Jimmy Hoffa and a wide assortment of Mafia chieftains. But recently the public has also learned that the FBI indulged in eavesdropping on Negro Leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Elijah Muhammad, as well as such white radicals as David Dellinger and Jerry Rubin. Not even Capitol Hill is immune, according to Democratic Senator Ralph W. Yarborough of Texas and Republican Senator Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska, who contend that congressional telephones have also been subjected to bugging.
If anything, the Nixon Administration has been less than apologetic about the practice. Last month, in a memorandum filed during the Chicago trial of eight men charged with conspiring to incite acts of violence during the Democratic National Convention, the Justice Department claimed the inherent right to bug or wiretap—without court orders—any time it felt that the "national security" was in jeopardy, As authority for this broad power, the Government cited the President's oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" from domestic subversion as well as foreign enemies. Contending that every President since Franklin Roosevelt had permitted such wiretaps, the Government went on to imply that they were even more important now because of the growing violence and rioting in the nation's cities and on its campuses.
Some legal historians have found that argument more sinister than anything since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when constitutional rights were openly violated on the ironic grounds that this was the only way to defend the Constitution. "It is an outrage," declared Columbia University Government Professor Alan Westin, author of the 1967 book Privacy and Freedom and one of 13 professors who fired off an impassioned protest to Mitchell. "It is one of the most dangerous claims for power by an Attorney General in our history."