Wiretaps: Not the Answer

In the wrong hands, wiretapping can be the most sinister of law-enforcement tools, the very essence of Big Brother. When a tap is installed on a single telephone, hundreds of people--the innocent as well as the guilty--can be swept up in a dragnet, their conversations monitored, their privacy violated. Anyone who has ever used a telephone in China or the Soviet Union knows that someone may be listening, and such abuses are not confined to totalitarian states. In this country, wiretapping has been used to spy on civil-rights and anti-war activists, despite a 1968 federal law that puts strict limits on such eavesdropping.

Now the Legislature is on the verge of authorizing state and local law-enforcement officials to add wiretapping to their arsenals. A bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) and backed by Gov. George Deukmejian, would allow the police to tap the telephones of suspected drug dealers, under court order. A vote is expected in the Assembly today, and similar, though broader legislation already has been approved by the state Senate.

No one wants to deny police officers every tool they need to battle the spread of illegal drugs, but it is far from clear that this bill is the answer.

Its proponents contend that state wiretapping authority is needed because big-time drug dealers are moving their operations to California, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal authorities lack the manpower to tackle the problem. In theory, state and local authorities can ask the federal government to install wiretaps under the 1968 law, but few do; they say the process is cumbersome and that the offices of U.S. attorneys are swamped with other cases and preoccupied with their own priorities, usually drug-import cases. Besides, they don’t want to turn their cases over to federal prosecutors.

On its face, the wiretapping bill is reasonable, hedged with safeguards aimed at limiting the state’s right to pry. A wiretap could be installed by the police only after obtaining the permission of the local district attorney and the presiding judge of a Superior Court, and only if the suspects were thought to be peddling huge quantities of drugs--10 gallons of liquid narcotics or three pounds of solid cocaine or heroin. As an added precaution, the authorities would have to return to court every 72 hours to justify the continuation of a tap.

Wiretapping is not a panacea. The federal government and the 31 states with eavesdropping statutes on their books have found wiretapping helpful in breaking some big cases, usually involving organized crime, but they use it sparingly because of its expense. New York state, for example, has never reported more than 30 wiretaps a year.

In California, no one really knows how often wiretaps would be used or whether the drug dealers at whom this bill is targeted use their telephones to carry out their transactions; there have been no hearings this year in the Assembly Public Safety Committee to establish such facts. Our guess is that if drug dealers are not already smart enough to avoid the phones, they’d get smart soon if the wiretap law went into effect.

The key issue for California legislators to consider is whether public safety and the anti-drug drive would be sufficiently enhanced by this bill to justify the bill’s incursions on personal liberty. It’s a close call, we admit, but we come down on the side of liberty--and against more wiretapping.