“Watergate and a lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam… served, I think, to erode the authority … the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area” – Vice President and Former Nixon Staffer Dick Cheney

Imagine White House operatives were caught illegally wiretapping Democratic National Committee headquarters during the coming Presidential election. That according to the head of the DNC, those listening in had overheard the conversations of what the Chairman speculated to be “perhaps every prominent Democrat in America.” Imagine White House operatives with the help of current and former U.S. intelligence agency personnel conducted illegal break-ins, illegal wiretapping, and illegal espionage against ordinary citizens, journalists, Democratic Party candidates, and even members of its own administration for the purposes of political dominance and electoral victory. Now imagine the President justified it all and sought to conceal its existence with a claim of national security and executive privilege.

It was called Watergate, and it may be more relevant today than it has been at any time since Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace more than 30 years ago.

Nixon’s White House relied on law enforcement and intelligence agencies, ex-F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents, and cadres of miscellaneous and unsavory personnel in their efforts to identify, root out, and embarrass “political enemies.” In the name of national security, they wiretapped those opposed to the war in Vietnam and those within its own administration suspected of leaking to the press. It also sought to surveil and sabotage the Democratic Party. Morton Halperin, once on the Nixon payroll was wiretapped while later working for Democrat Ed Muskie, then a contender for that party’s nomination to the presidency. “I was working on the Muskie campaign for president,” Halperin recalls in a 2005 interview for NPR “They picked up calls about that. They picked up many personal calls. My little kids were on the phone and they got those. My wife’s phone calls — everything was intercepted.” Nixon’s “Plumbers” unit broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to gather information that could be used against him for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The Committee to Re-elect the President even attempted to wiretap the headquarters of eventual Democratic nominee and Nixon opponent Senator George McGovern, and were known to have wiretaps on journalists within The New York Times and CBS.

In the wake of Watergate and the findings of the Church Committee, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA was conceived to check government spy power by mandating judicial oversight of national security related investigations involving parties residing in the U.S. It was designed to safeguard citizens’ constitutionally guaranteed Fourth Amendment rights and allow for the investigation of foreign individual suspects, all while checking the power of those who could abuse spy power for political or personal gain.

In 2002, the Bush administration began authorizing government surveillance without seeking the oversight required by law. The President says the law has prohibited the government from keeping up with the quickly evolving landscape of modern-day terrorism, and so in the interest of national security, he has simply gone around it.

Government surveillance is increasingly being conducted through an avenue where constitutional checks can effectively be avoided: the private sector. According to Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) in an interview on Meet the Press in 2007, “Telecoms [have] turned over thousands if not millions of records without a court order.

According to whistle-blower Babak Pasdar, the government has installed a backdoor into at least one major wireless carrier allowing unrestricted surveillance of all its customers’ communications. A similar claim was made by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, with regards to his former employer’s secret internet surveillance hub based in San Francisco. In a lawsuit filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 similar hubs scattered throughout the country. 

The specifics of how government surveillance programs operate has until very recently been a matter of pure speculation. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal has, however, shed some light on the massive scope and capability of these programs. Government intelligence agencies can begin with something as simple as a phone number or an Internet address and quickly track “all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net.” They may also choose to begin more broadly, by directing “the government’s spy systems” “to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of” a given city. Information collected would include: “records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing” as well as “a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting.” The system would also collect information about other people, including those residing in the U.S., who communicated with the original people targeted for surveillance utilizing social network modeling technology.

One is forced to wonder, what checks are left to protect the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of average citizens, but also of opposition party candidates during an election period. What is to prevent a modern-day Nixon administration from applying modern-day surveillance technology against its political opponents?

With the record of the Nixon administration’s unrestrained abuse of the public trust, history demonstrates that a grant of unchecked surveillance power is a step toward the corruption of our democratic process. Any breach of procedure with regards to FISA should be considered a breach of that system put in place to protect the workings of our democracy against the abuse of an unscrupulous executive. Unchecked government surveillance power presents a potentially insurmountable challenge to the survival of democratic government especially during a presidential election cycle where incumbent loyalties and opposition rivalries can tempt an administration to abuse its power for party gain.

In the end, all eyes must return to Nixon. If the Nixon administration now occupied the White House, with access to modern day surveillance technology, what does history tell us about its probable course of action during the coming election? How might that group of men go about leveraging government spy power against opposition party candidates? How are we to safeguard our democracy against the hand of unchecked politically-motivated surveillance?

“If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States. And if these allegations prove to be true, what they were seeking to steal was not the jewels, money or other precious property of American citizens, but something much more valuable - their most precious heritage: the right to vote in a free election.” –Senator Sam Ervin, Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activites, The Watergate Hearings