The political dangers of wiretaps (UPDATED)

During all of the fuss last week about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's liasons with expensive prostitutes, I found myself wondering if there was a political side to the whole thing.

Sure, the Feds said that they had begun the investigation to follow up on unusual bank transactions to which they had been alerted, and that's certainly plausible.

But Spitzer had also clearly made many, many people in the financial industry unhappy... and most likely plenty of folks in the Federal government as well.

So I have no evidence that there was any political angle to the wiretaps that recorded his negotiations to hire "Kristen," but this Los Angeles Times editorial describes the history of political eavesdropping and the passage of the FISA bill to prevent it:

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts--and the presidents they served--had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices--even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often "collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action."

Wiretap abuses can have devastating impacts on individuals, but the far greater danger is the political one that arises when those in power will do anything to remain there.

UPDATED: Just ran across this commentary from Alan Dershowitz on "The Entrapment of Eliot."