The Ghost of Watergate

This is too weird. Last night at the supper table, Daughter and I had a discussion centering around the NSA actions in tapping phone calls, the newly revealed government access to international banking records and Watergate.

Daughter, of course, isn’t old enough to remember that time, and according the her, it’s given only a paragraph in her current history book. (!) So I had to explain my remark that all of these revelations was starting to remind me of Watergate.

Today I find Wired with this: Watergate Echoes in NSA Courtroom

This article (which is dateline last Friday, showing that great minds do indeed think alike *ahem*) points out that:

The government’s surveillance activities of the 1970s were an ever-present ghost in the nearly three-hour-long hearing Friday, in a case that’s emerging as a crucial challenge of the law passed in response to Watergate-era abuses.

Perhaps there’s some truth to the saying that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.