An interesting pattern is emerging from the illegal wiretaps story still coming out of the White House. It's one that I actually guessed would turn out to be the case based the precedent set by another recent controversy involving technology, privacy, and flagrant disregard for the law. Allow me to explain.

On October 31 of this year, Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals.com exposed Sony's clandestine installation of an illegal spyware program onto every computer that played their CDs. In response, Sony lied and said that the program, a rootkit, "is not malicious and does not compromise security." They also released an uninstaller program to remove the rootkit from affected computers. A few days later, Ed Felton, a digital rights management expert and computer science and public affairs from Princeton University, discovered that the uninstaller program Sony released was nothing of the sort. In fact, it likely beefed up the original rootkit already installed on users' computers.

This carried on for a while, and is still an on-going matter, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursuing civil suits against Sony in New York and California. Texas has sued Sony for possible violations of the state's anti-spyware law, and many expect New York State to do the same. It's still not clear whether or not all of the information about Sony's illegal spyware campaign has been made public. The company has lied at a number of points throughout the debate, it's hard to take them at their word.

When I first learned of the White House's illegal wiretap program, the Sony rootkit debacle immediately jumped to mind. Both programs were ostensibly aimed at targeting illegal activity. When each was revealed, the offending party claimed it was no big deal and denied any wrongdoing. But each was more widespread a problem than anyone had initially guessed, not to mention illegal. According to a new article in The New York Times, it turns out my gut instinct was right.

Much like the rootkit story, this is snowballing into something much bigger than it first seemed -- and it seemed big to begin with. There's a great deal of speculation about what revelations are still forthcoming about the White House's illegal wiretaps program. First, they told us they were only spying on people speaking to foreign terrorists from within American borders. Then we learned that the FBI was spying on everyone from vegans to Catholics under the guise of investigating domestic terrorism. And now we find out that the administration in seemingly unwilling to draw any line in terms of who they should and should not be allowed to spy on. So what's next?

Bush supporters -- I won't say Republicans as many of them are not behind him on this one -- want to make this an issue of safety vs. law, but that's a false dichotomy. The existing FISA court, which has seen one judge resign in protest, is and has been more than adequate a tool for the administration to use if they want emergency wiretap authority, even retroactively. There would have been nothing wrong with following the law in this case.

The real issue at hand is that the President and his administration do not believe they are accountable to anyone.