In fact, a case could be made that the voting public has a right to know where our presidential candidates go and who they talk to. Or at the very least receive the same level of scrutiny that any of us would.

Someone explain this to me.

of course, by only protecting the elite, and by letting everyone know about exactly how the alarm works, you’ve just left almost the whole system wide open for abuse. Agents can snoop on the ethnic neighbor down the street, their daughter’s boyfriend, or that cute blond.

Fortunately, the contractors have been discharged so they can now take the Fifth. Awesome.

However, the sort of jackhat who’ll snoop people’s records when he shouldn’t is very likely to pick some famous people at some point; putting watches on a number of those produces a much better ratio of “bad” accesses to trap, to find abusers.

Not an issue of the Peons vs. the Mighty Ones, but of the most efficient way to catch the greatest number of likely abusers of the system.

This sort of thing is a reasonably smart way to find abuses of such a system.

The violations were detected by internal State Department computer checks because certain records, including those of high-profile people, are “flagged” with a computer tag that tips off supervisors when someone tries to view the records without a proper reason.

(emphasis mine)

Peons, of course, well you know. No word on how you get to become state department’s kind of people.