Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

This logic would be a good basis for a science fiction story about the invention of telepathy, and the government's inevitable insistence that it needs to tap into our brains. Greenwald explains why this news is more extreme than it first appears: