Even with their expanded police state powers, federal government snoops can’t manage to stay within the law:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said….
In one instance, the F.B.I. received the full content of 181 telephone calls as part of an intelligence investigation, instead of merely the billing and toll records as authorized, the report found. In a handful of cases, it said, the bureau conducted physical searches that had not been properly authorized….
The inspector general’s review found that reported violations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs some federal wiretaps, accounted for a growing share of the total, having risen to 69 percent last year from 48 percent in 2004.
The duration of the violations also grew in some crucial areas, the review found. Two of those areas were the “overcollection” of intelligence — going beyond the scope approved by the court in authorizing a wiretap — and “overruns,” in which a wiretap or other intelligence-gathering method was allowed to continue beyond the approved time period without an extension.
The review found that the average amount of time that overcollections and overruns were allowed before they were discovered and corrected rose to 32 days last year from 22 in 2004. In most cases, the F.B.I. was found to be at fault, while about a quarter of the time a “third party,” usually a telecommunications company, was to blame, the data showed.
