Interesting Paragraph from Mickey Kaus

This is via InstaPundit:

Amnesty for illegal wiretappers? Aren't the parameters of the great eavesdropping debate becoming clearer? 1) The administration bypassed the special FISA court, not because it would somehow have been too time consuming to obtain warrants, but because warrants wouldn't have been granted under the "probable cause" standard; 2) the warrants wouldn't have been granted because the wiretaps were quasi-data-mining wiretaps, trolling phone calls of 10% likely suspects for tipoff phrases like "Brooklyn Bridge;" 3) that's probably illegal; 4) but it's also probably a good way to stop terror plots--it hardly presents a "false choice;" 5) the solution is to make it explicitly legal--lower the standard for search warrants, allow mass warrants for whole bundles of phone calls, while retaining some judicial supervision. ... Explicit legalization seems the obvious solution because the "privacy" interest involved--the danger that government has "listened in on some people who turned out not to pose a threat"--is, if not trivial, several orders of magnitude lower than the threat itself. Privacy interests have always been overblown in the American civil libertarian scheme of things, and they're becoming more overblown now that email communications are routinely introduced in court, while cell phone conversations get picked up by amateur scanners. "Reasonable expectations of privacy," as the lawyers put it, are simply lower in the age of blogs and Webcams and surveillance videos than in the age of dial telephones. ... I wouldn't be all that upset if the Feds ran every damn phone call through the Echelon-style NSA computers. Do you have a problem with that?

What do you think?