It’s amazing what privacy a simple wall can afford. Once you’re out of sight of someone else, everything you do becomes secret. No one else knows that you’re picking your nose, not washing your hands after you use the bathroom, or walking around in your underpants. Privacy, though, doesn’t extend only to those things we’d rather people not find out about. Privacy exists as an end unto itself. There’s no reason why people need to know what television shows we watch, even if those shows are innocuous network programming. At its most important, the idea of privacy allows us to engage in conduct that hurts no one but ourselves. For a person who has been born and raised in a democratic country such as ours, the idea that external forces would care about our opinions or our sexual habits is mind-boggling. Part of what keeps a dictatorship in power, though, is controlling the private lives of its citizens and ensuring that those citizens aren’t thinking things or doing things that the dictator might see as a threat to his power. When privacy has no foes to grapple with, its existence goes unnoticed. But when privacy comes up against someone trying to peer into someone’s window or listen on someone’s phone, we find out how effective our society’s privacy laws are.

For the last six years, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and their friends at the National Security Agency have been spying on U.S. citizens for no other reason than those citizens may have been making phone calls to foreign countries that are associated with terrorism. This should immediately evoke rebuke from people who understand the necessity of privacy: why does the Bush administration need to know whom I’m calling? Yes, there’s a chance that I could be calling a terrorist compatriot in Saudi Arabia and working on plans to destroy a national landmark, causing millions of dollars in damage and thousands of lives. But there’s an equally good chance that I could be calling my poor, sick Saudi grandmother. Who is to know?

Prior to 1978, no one really knew. Despite the government’s insistence that the president’s ability to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance is a no-brainer, the history of foreign intelligence surveillance in this country shows that notion to be an outright lie. The Supreme Court upheld and reversed itself at least twice over the issue of warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance. President Nixon believed that, as president, he had carte blanche to conduct surveillance on whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Over the course of two years, Church Committee pounded out several volumes of testimony regarding intelligence abuses, leading to 1978’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA codified and put into plain terms where, when, and how the executive could conduct foreign intelligence surveillance, which is defined as surveillance of foreign persons within the United States. Despite what Joe Klein may think, no one needs a warrant to conduct surveillance outside the United States upon foreign targets. Within the United States, the government is bound by normal warrant requirements if it wishes to conduct surveillance on “United States persons” within U.S. borders.

And yet, FISA wasn’t enough for the Bush administration. In 2005, we learned that the administration had been conducting warrantless wiretapping, in the process potentially capturing the communications of “United States persons” – defined in FISA as U.S. citizens or nationals – something that is expressly forbidden under FISA. Realistically, though, we don’t know what communications had been captured, since the program was secret. Our privacy laws failed us because our leader decided that FISA was too cumbersome, and therefore, used an as-yet undiscovered “inherent” authority to overstep the law and do things his way. Welcome to the Sinatra administration.

A year later, we found out that the administration had asked several U.S. phone companies to help it in its spying. “Would you please turn over customer records to us?” it said. “Well, why not?” they replied – all of them except Qwest Communications, which looked at the government’s request and said, “Gee, this looks like it invades our customers’ privacy and could open us up to litigation. No thanks; we’ll pass on this one.” But the other phone companies gleefully complied with the administration’s request. AT&T even built a secret room in its San Francisco substation where government agents could monitor Internet traffic. AT&T even wrote a program that could search voice and data records for particular keywords, assessing whether or not the results were actually relevant to terrorism. All of this without a court order; the phone companies did this voluntarily.

In the end, Qwest Communications may have done the right thing. The phone companies definitely did break several privacy laws, and now they’re the objects of several lawsuits. As it turns out, phone companies can’t give away information to people who ask for it, not even if they really, really want to help, in the same way that a Boy Scout helps an old woman cross the street. No, unlike that boy scout, phone companies must be compelled – by a court order, signed by a real, live federal judge, who has looked at actual evidence and determined that, yes, these records are necessary in order to prosecute a crime – to give up that information.

But spying may have taken a new turn. The New York Times reported Saturday that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has been monitoring phone calls between the United States and Latin America in an attempt to find information about drugs. The same article says that the government wanted access, in 2001, to Qwest’s most localized phone switching equipment, which “could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order.”

To what end?

While it may be easy to understand why the federal government would want to monitor calls overseas – it’s where our enemies are, after all – it’s much more difficult to understand why the government needs to spy on individual neighborhoods. Perhaps it wants to see if Wally and the Beaver are meeting to buy heroin from Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs. Is it concerned that Ward is running a tax-evasion ring with Fred McMurray and Sheriff Andy Taylor? (Note: I couldn’t remember offhand who Fred McMurray’s character was in My Three Sons, but who remembers that, anyway?) Spying on individual neighborhoods is no less illegal than conducting warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance, but it is a whole lot more sinister. Which brings us to the question of the week: “To what end?”

Spying is supposed to serve a logical end, beyond merely just spying. It’s almost as though listening to other people’s phone conversations is something they do in Quantico just for giggles. “Can you believe that Donna Reed is having a lesbian affair with June Cleaver?” No one’s worried about whether or not there’s a KAOS agent living undercover in Anytown, USA. They’re more fascinated that there can be such a thing as “identical cousins.”

The mundanities of our everyday lives are just as deserving of protection as our seditious political opinions, our heathen sexual orientations, and our union memberships. In some ways, discovering that the government has been listening in on our gossip is more disconcerting than if it were listening in on our conference calls to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It means that the government is willing to do things without a reason. It doesn’t make any sense. It means that we don’t know what to do if we want to put our heads down and comply with what we’re told. This is another facet of dictatorships: capriciousness. In a dictatorship, a person can be arrested for any reason, at any time, even if the person were objectively doing nothing wrong. "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged,” said Cardinal Richelieu. The trouble with the attitude of “Si no te metías con nadie, nada pasó” is that it presumes that the state intelligence apparatus behaves rationally and won’t arbitrarily prosecute, imprison, or execute someone just to “make an example” of him. In a democracy, keeping your head down and your mouth shut keeps the government out of your hair; in a dictatorship, there’s no guarantee that complying with the law will keep you alive and out of prison.

For this reason – and others – privacy is valuable in itself. It prevents the government from making up reasons why you should be prosecuted. It keeps democracy honest, and when privacy breaks down, tyranny seeps in, especially when things of no importance suddenly become a matter of great importance to the government. “The excruciating minutiae of everyday life,” as Elaine from Seinfeld called it, is our business and no one else’s. Michael Hayden, stay away from my underpants.