Who's on the Line? These Days, It Could Be Everyone

In the blink of an eye, you could miss it -- that scene in "The Bourne Supremacy" when Jason Bourne delivers a lightning-quick beat-down to a U.S. consulate official in Naples, then grabs the man's PDA, manipulates its micro-motherboard, and drives off listening to the man on this 21st-century wiretap. And in the latest film, "The Bourne Ultimatum," wiretapping is the very deed that drives the frenetic plot.

In these types of adrenaline-pumping portrayals of electronic eavesdropping, reality must step aside so that Bourne (when he's not crashing a car) or "24's" Jack Bauer (when he's not torturing someone) can eavesdrop in real time, real fast. And it's always for the good, you see, because Bourne's gotta find out what sinister spook programmed him to be a stone-cold killer and Bauer's gotta save the world. The ends justify the means. No time for questions.

Wiretapping thus becomes swashbuckling and romantic, as if it were a national security technique to be deployed whenever necessary, without hindrance, by those supremely smart, exceptionally gifted and oh-so-moral people who walk the proverbial wall protecting our freedom from certain demise.

It's a far cry from the reality of wiretapping -- so routine, so tedious, like watching dripping water. Old-school wiretapping was captured most perfectly in "The Lives of Others," last year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, about surveillance by Stasi agents of the former East Germany: the long hours listening to conversations as a reel of tape wound round and round. Those were the days when "wiretap" meant using alligator clips to literally tap into a phone wire.

And today? Who would want to sit and watch National Security Agency supercomputers intercept voice data from millions of phone calls coursing through fiber optic cables? Don't all rush to the multiplex at once!

It's the kind of wiretapping depicted in "The Bourne Ultimatum." "We intercepted a call in London. Key word 'blackbriar,' " a CIA agent says in the movie. Though individual wiretaps remain prevalent, soo too is the collection and analysis of massive amounts of voice data.

The legality of that tapping is being debated by politicians and privacy experts, especially since President Bush signed off on legislation last weekend that expands the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

Civil liberties advocates are up in arms about the law -- and also more than a bit concerned about depictions of bugging and wiretapping on the big screen (and the small one). Watching wiretapping, Hollywood-style, has become so scintillating that some people fear we are being inured to the potentially sinister and abusive side of its uses.

Take "24," where nothing gets done without wiretapping, computer hacking, torture and killing. The show and its depictions of torture are particular peeves of civil libertarians (and a general and some military interrogators who complained to the show's creators about it, the New Yorker wrote in February).

Lisa Graves, deputy director of the nonprofit Center for National Security Studies, says there's something pernicious about the show's premise. "It assumes that they always have the bad guy, that they're never wrong," she says.

Graves has stopped watching "24."

"I don't want to spend any more of my time than necessary being immersed in the indoctrination of this culture of the ready use of torture and surveillance in the violation of the rule of law," Graves says.