An old friend of mine, Margaret “Peggy” Engel, a former _Washington Post_ reporter who ran and still runs a respected journalism foundation, was among the snoops’ victims. Bureaucrats got the phone company to turn over a list of Peggy’s calls even though she had not committed a crime. It seems a freelance writer had managed to dig up some inside information on the failure of the IRS to collect several billion dollars in back taxes from corporations that had profited from currency hedging. This same writer later applied for a grant from Engel’s organization, the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Vindictively, the Feds snooped on Engel, too, simply because the writer had made a call to Engel’s office for an application for a fellowship. So it went. Because Peggy and I talked from time to time, the Feds had also tracked her telephone and computer calls to me. They acted against her under a casually issued court order signed not by a judge but by an assistant deputy clerk—one of more than 20,000 such actions issued in the Washington area in 1992. “It’s like getting your parking ticket stamped,” she told me. “That’s the level of scrutiny that these things get. And the number keeps growing. I think it’s because of the increase in fax machines. I think agencies are using it on their employees to find out who talked to the press or Congress.” And now the Feds wanted to license the manufacture of a chip that would spill our secrets on demand. Granted, the Feds claimed that in the Clipper’s case, one bureaucrat could not spy alone. The official line was that people from both the Treasury Department and the National Institute for Standards and Technology would have to agree before an interception could take place. If they did, the electronic keys would go over the wires to local police or others needing the tap. All this would require a court order. Some Clipper boosters might well have argued, “We’re talking about strict controls.” But Peggy’s experience still showed the potential the Feds had for promiscuous Big Brothering, especially since both the Treasury and the Institute were within the Executive Branch. Later the front pages would sprout articles about bureaucrats reading the supposedly confidential tax information of their neighbors or of movie stars. Yes, the tax people tightened up their operations to avoid repeats. But supposedly the IRS had been secure in the first place.