om self incrimination) issues related to privacy have arisen as these questions are taken up by courts and legislatures.
In some respects, law enforcement solutions to these problems are perfectly reasonable. For example, the Clinton administration's proposal of the Telephony and Communications Privacy Improvement Act, intended to improve government access to changing communications technology for the purpose of wiretaps, was not the overwhelming threat of a general invasion of privacy that many people believed it to be. Instead, in the terms of the Act, the government was merely "allowed to do exactly what it has always been allowed to do." The much-feared clipper chip that was to be placed in computers, for example, could only be employed in accessing private communications when court-approved warrants had been issued. Certainly, in such cases, law enforcement's access to suspected criminal activities would be acceptable to most of the law-abiding citizens who feared this supposed invasion of privacy.
Such innovations as the clipper chip are permissible because they would only be accessible to those who are authorized to use them. Criminal access might, of course, be a problem, but this is just as true of computers without clipper chips. In some cases, law e
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