In 1784 John Jay, then United States Secretary for Foreign Affairs, was granted a power to invade individual privacy vastly greater than President Bush’s assertion of the right to wiretap phone calls involving terrorists inside and outside the United States. (See George Bush: Imperial President?)
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Congress issued an order permitting John Jay, as Foreign Secretary, to open any letter in any post office that might affect the “safety or interest of the United States.”
Letters in those days, of course, were the sole means of communication apart from verbal messages. Jay was thus free to scrutinize everybody’s communications with anyone, should he feel it necessary.
Conditions producing this extraordinary grant by Congress were similar to our situation today. Relations with Great Britain were increasingly tense, with renewed war a worrisome possibility.
Because states owing more than half the legitimate pre-war debt to British merchants had failed to honor the provision of the the war-ending treaty by paying up, the British kept their frontier outposts rather than handing them over to the United States as the treaty required. Instead they reinforced their garrisons, while influential people in Great Britain called for a new war with the United States to force collection of debts.
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