George Bush, like Nixon before him, can't resist bugging his enemies and covering up. But does he remember what became of his predecessor?

I developed a theme in my columns here last year without ever really intending to. I wrote that the Bush administration increasingly resembled that of Richard Nixon; and in two or three decades' time we will look back on Bush and his cronies in much the same way that we now remember Nixon and his inner cabal of advisers who ended up in prison; and that the Bush administration shares the same paranoia, wilful detachment from reality and cavalier authoritarianism. In Nixon's case, the excuse was the Vietnam war; in Bush's, the 11 September atrocities.

We now know that Bush authorised illegal wire-taps and then lied about it, just like Nixon. We know that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, not just Dick Cheney's chief of staff but a man who also gloried in the title of "assistant to the president", has been charged with perjury and obstruction of justice - just like Nixon's very own "assistant to the president", John Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in the clink for, yes, perjury and obstruction of justice. I could go on.

This week, though, I want to concentrate solely on the escalation of authoritarianism here. I invite anybody who doubts what I say to consider a sad little tale that for me is, literally, close to home. It concerns a private school near me called Georgetown Day. Last November somebody - a teenage boy with ties to the school, we can assume - hacked into the school's e-mail system. He found his way into the mailbox of a teacher and sent three pupils e-mails purporting to come from her. Two of them were clear pranks in which she appeared to be chastising the kids for poor academic work. The third was nasty - sexually obscene, racist and homophobic - but was still, even more obviously, a blatant hoax.

Not unreasonably the headmaster was furious and, when the culprit did not step forward, decided to call in the police. But it was not just the DC police - nor even, letting our imaginations run wild, the FBI, say - that began to investigate what was clearly never more than a tasteless teenage prank. It was the US Secret Service that moved in. It obtained the IP address of the computer from which the e-mails were sent and traced it to the household of neighbours of ours who happen - this may or may not yet prove relevant - to be major fundraisers for the Democrats. They also have a teenage son who used to attend the school.

Was that the end of the matter, leaving one teenager in very hot water? No. On 6 January the US Secret Service, led by Special Agent Scott D Reed, raided the family home close to ours and took away two G4 Apple laptops, an external hard-drive, two USB cables and - I kid not - an iPod. These events have since become the subject of feverish gossip among our other friends and neighbours, but in the current atmosphere I have not come across one who has questioned either the right of the police, FBI and Secret Service to act in this way, or whether it was appropriate. It's necessary because of 9/11, you see.

That, indeed, is the sole justification the Bush administration is now using for having authorised the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland - an organisation so shadowy that it used to be known in Washington as "No Such Agency" - to bug the phones and e-mails of Americans inside the US without obtaining even the highly secret court warrants required.

Three days after the 11 September atrocities, Congress authorised the president "to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organisations or persons he determines planned, authorised, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001" - and the White House and Bush's attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, are disingenuously insisting that Congress in effect gave the president the right to do anything he wants if he deems it necessary to combat future atrocities.

The tragedy of all this, however, is that nobody will learn the lesson of history: that authority, given the chance, always overreaches itself and wreaks havoc in people's lives. To give just one example: on 4 June 1969 Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell - who later went to prison for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury - ordered a wire-tap on Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, the same day that Smith reported the politically embarrassing news that the number of US troops in Vietnam was to be reduced.

Nixon's secret net was then widened to include various officials inside the National Security Agency itself and such unlikely people as the late Henry Brandon, the long-time Sunday Times correspondent and supreme social climber who had excellent sources. The paranoia was such that, although Brandon was close to Henry Kissinger and even to Nixon himself, none trusted the other and the FBI was simultaneously insisting that Brandon was an agent either of Czechoslovakia (where he was born) or of MI6. But perhaps most pertinent of all was that his wife was a close friend of the then wife of Nixon's foe Ted Kennedy, and that bugging the Brandons' phone provided useful intelligence about Kennedy's private life.

The upshot of Nixon's wire-tapping, his subsequent disgrace, the imprisonment of senior members of his administration and the ruination of numerous lives was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 1978. It provided a clear constitutional framework in which a US president could authorise the wire-tapping of, say, suspected terrorists communicating to or from the United States; in many ways it actually made the process easier. Following the 2001 atrocities, the act was amended to make such legal bugging easier still.

Yet the Bush administration, like Nixon's, chose not only to act outside the law - which had become more clear-headed and pragmatic than under Nixon - but then to lie about it, too.

In 2004, two years after beginning his secret bugging authorisations, Bush offered a reassurance that "a wire-tap requires a court order. Nothing has changed . . . When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." The president not telling the truth is OK because of 9/11, you see.

In March 2004 Bush's deputy attorney general James Comey refused to sign off on renewing the bugging authorisations, apparently because he doubted their legality; Gonzales, then counsel to the president, rushed to the hospital bedside of the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, to get his signature instead. Ashcroft, an ultra-Bushite hawk, gave it - but, I gather, only with reluctance.

Perhaps he was remembering the fate of his predecessor, John Mitchell. And does Gonzales, I wonder, ever give a thought to what happened to John Dean, who occupied his old chair as counsel in Nixon's White House? Yes, he was sentenced to four years' imprisonment - but then deserted the sinking ship and implicated numerous colleagues, saving himself prison time but putting the likes of Mitchell and Ehrlichman behind bars. Dean is now a spritely 67 and says that, because Bush acknowledges that he authorised wire-taps without obtaining secret court warrants, he is "the first president to admit to an impeachable offence".

He knows what he is talking about, too. Dean, a clever lawyer who learned everything there is to know about the legalities of wire-tapping, became a household name when he started giving electrifying evidence about it to the Senate Watergate committee 33 years ago.

Now the wheel has turned and another Senate committee is due to start hearings on Bush's wire-tapping on 6 February. The White House is worried and has embarked on an intense campaign to persuade the public that what Bush has done is vital for the protection of America, but so far opinion polls show that only about half the nation is convinced. The consensus wisdom in Washington is that Bush will easily win the debate that his wire-tapping is above board, but I am not so sure.

I see little reason to doubt that the overwhelming thrust of the Bush surveillance programme has, indeed, been directed against the threat of more terrorism. But history always repeats itself. It now seems ludicrous that Henry Brandon and his wife Muffie should have been bugged, but that was because the likes of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig could not stop themselves seizing that extra little bit of power that was theirs for the taking - and which was morally justifiable to boot (it seemed to them) because America was engaged in a terrible war in which lives were at stake.

The hot rumour in Washington is that the phones of Christiane Amanpour, chief international correspondent of CNN, are among those that have been tapped under the secret Bush authorisations. This may be complete nonsense and groundless. But who, given what we now know and the climate of mute acceptance that has been engendered by Bush's shameless fear- mongering, should be surprised if it is true?

If the FBI and US Secret Service are prepared to waste their resources pursuing not terrorists but the laptop and iPod of a teenage boy, what other abuses of power are going on?

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