Wiretapping, European Style

From Slate, hardly a conservative mouthpiece:

Think Bush's warrantless NSA surveillance is bad? Wait till you hear what the British government does.

By Eric Weiner
Updated Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006, at 6:39 AM ET

For Europeans, scolding the Bush administration for everything from Guantanamo to the Iraq War to secret CIA prisons has become a full-time job. But when it comes to the American scandal over President Bush's warrantless wiretaps, there's been a curious reaction from the other side of the Atlantic: silence. Where is the European outrage?

European restraint may arise from a fear of hypocrisy. The fact is that in much of Europe wiretapping is de rigueur—practiced more regularly and with less oversight than in the United States. Most Europeans either don't know about this or, more likely, simply don't care.