There’s simply no way to give people access to others’ private records — in the name of security or otherwise — and trust those given access to do the right thing. From a New York Times story on the NSA’s expanded wiretapping:

The former analyst added that his instructors had warned against committing any abuses, telling his class that another analyst had been investigated because he had improperly accessed the personal e-mail of former President Bill Clinton.

This is not isolated, and this will always be the case. From a story in The Boston Globe a month ago:

Law enforcement personnel looked up personal information on Patriots star Tom Brady 968 times – seeking anything from his driver’s license photo and home address, to whether he had purchased a gun – and auditors discovered “repeated searches and queries” on dozens of other celebrities such as Matt Damon, James Taylor, Celtics star Paul Pierce, and Red Sox owner John Henry, said two state officials familiar with the audit.

The NSA wiretapping is treated too much like an abstract operation, with most articles that describe it overloaded with talk of “data collection,” and “monitoring,” and the massive scale of data that traffics through internet service providers. But the problem isn’t the computers and data and equipment, it’s that on the other end of the line, a human being is sitting there deciding what to do with that information. Our curiosity and voyeurism leaves us fundamentally flawed for dealing with such information, and unable to ever live up to the responsibility of having that access.

The story about the police officers who are overly curious about sports stars (or soft rock balladeers) is no different from the NSA wiretapping, because it’s still people, with the same impulses, on the other end of the line. Until reading this, I had wanted to believe that NSA employees — who should truly understand the ramifications — would have been more professional. But instead they’ve proven themselves no different from a local cop who wants to know if Paul Pierce owns a gun or Matt Damon has a goofy driver’s license picture.