Santorum says....

[MrVisible]

Well, since I take sentencings seriously, I scampered off and looked it up. After all, I thought, MaggieL certainly couldn't be excusing the behavior of an administration that's been eavesdropping on anyone who's suspected of having any connection with terrorism without easily-obtainable warrants, that's been coercing telcos into gathering data on all U.S. phone calls in order to build an enormous database with which to track us, by comparing it to a defunct proposal by a previous administration that didn't end up tapping a single phone call warrantlessly, could she?

But, as it turns out, that's exactly the case. The Clipper Chip was a failed proposal to encourage manufacturers to include encryption devices in their telecommunications products while giving the cipher keys to the government to hold 'in escrow' in order to be able to intercept calls when necessary. Nothing was said about doing so without warrants. I suppose they wanted to leave that for the next guys.

The end result? Widely available free cryptography like PGP made the Clipper Chip irrelevant. Nothing was produced using it, the idea was bad to start with, and within three years of the proposal being introduced, it was history.

This was an attempt at making sure that the government had the means to tap people's phone calls as needed, using the then-popular warranted search methods, which never tapped a single phone call.

This compares to or excuses, the Bush administrations actions in what way, exactly?