Via Tech Liberation Front, privacy expert Susan Landau has an important Washington Post op-ed on how an expanded wiretapping infrastructure might make it easier for hackers to eavesdrop on us. As Landau points out, this is not hypothetical: We know that even the most top-secret government networks have been breached in the recent past. The key point that Landau doesn’t quite state explicitly here is the likelihood, supported at this point by quite substantial circumstantial evidence, that the FISA amendment was meant to license not only conventional wiretaps, but a massive Echelon-style filter system designed to flag communications containing particular keywords or otherwise matching specific “suspicious” patterns.