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

Sometimes, though, it is the bad guys in film who use the wires. "Enemy of the State" (1998), for instance, had Will Smith as a target of a rogue intelligence official trying to shut him up.

Real life has been equally sinister when it comes to wiretapping. Remember Cointelpro, that massive FBI surveillance program of 1956-71 aimed at suppressing dissident voices? One target was Martin Luther King Jr.

These days, the debate about surveillance is complicated by the blurring of the line between public and private.

Cameras are on us when we shop, bank, drive, gather to protest. Willing partakers of Web culture splay their personal details across the Internet. Anyone can take a photo anytime and send it almost anywhere. Surveillance even has become entertainment, called reality TV. We like to watch, even to be watched, at least when we volunteer for it.

Technology, 9/11 and the politics of the war on terror have shifted the paradigm on privacy, for better or worse. Perhaps that is why Americans have not been howling about the possible intrusion of wiretapping into their telephone use.

"You don't necessarily have the sense, when you see Jack Bauer, that it's wrong," says Barry Carter, a Georgetown law professor. Back in the 1970s, Carter investigated widespread NSA phone wiretapping and reading of telegrams as part of the Church Committee's probe of intelligence abuses. (The committee was named for its chairman, Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.)

Back then, "it was accepted that it was wrong that these things were being done," he says.

Today, the mass interception of telephone calls is defended by the Bush administration as a necessary tool against terrorism while opponents decry it as a dangerous encroachment on our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure.

And polls suggest some people accept that intrusion as the price of security.

In a June poll by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, respondents were split -- 48 percent yes, 48 percent no -- on whether the government, in its fight against terrorism, is doing enough to protect the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. And last year, when a Washington Post-ABC News poll asked if the FBI should continue to be authorized to wiretap people, surveil them and obtain records as part of the fight against terrorism, 62 percent of respondents said such authority should continue, while 37 percent said it should not.

Paul Levinson, chairman of communication and media studies at Fordham University in New York, believes people have come to expect that their right to privacy is different than in the past.

"Not that we think it's okay, but we've come to look at our environment as having perpetually open ears to everything that we're saying," Levinson said. "I think the genie is out of the bottle."