McCain used to think that Bush's warrentless wiretaps were illegal

In January 2008, McCain made it clear that the Bush administration was obliged to follow the law regarding the wiretapping of domestic communications

There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.

His actions spoke somewhat differently, for in the next month he consistently voted against any attempts to pull retroactive immunity out of the wiretapping bill or limit the surveillance program in any way.

Despite those votes, the McCain campaign decided to take a hard stance for accountability in May 2008

There would need to be hearings, real hearings, to find out what actually happened, what harms actually occurred, rather than some sort of sweeping of things under the rug," Chuck Fish, a former vice president and chief patent counsel at Time Warner, said last week at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in New Haven, Conn., according to an audiotape available on the conference Web site. "That would be absolutely verboten in a McCain administration."

But but with the chance to push for just the kind of clarity on legality that he had claimed to support, he threw it out with another contradictory vote:

McCain was one of 41 senators to vote against an amendment to make the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the exclusive means for electronic surveillance in this country, an amendment offered to provide the clarity McCain says he wants, Democratic aides say. The amendment failed to get the 60 votes needed for passage.

"If that's his view today, he had a chance to back it up in recent votes on the Senate floor, and he did not," said David Carle, spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).

And then in June 2008, he seemed to dismiss his previous public positions when his top advisor declared that McCain believed Bush's circumventing of the law to be perfectly okay and appeared to want things to be swept under the rug:

neither the administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the A.C.L.U. and trial lawyers, understand were constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001

So, is he for warrentless wiretapping or against it? Does he want accountability, or does he believe that it's all okay? You decide!