Sorry, wrong number: truly roving wiretaps.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 - Brief Article

HAVE THE FEDS been snooping on you by mistake? That was the specter raised by a September 2005 report from the Justice Department's inspector general, which found that an undisclosed number of monitored telecommunications picked up conversations between people who were not remotely under suspicion.

Under the PATRIOT Act, the FBI has unprecedented authority to eavesdrop on all phone and Internet communications of individual American citizens, as long as agents obtain approval from a secret court. In 2004, 1,745 such warrants were issued. DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine zeroed in on the backlog of untranslated foreign-language conversations--38,514 hours' worth, or about 4-4 years of recordings--and found that an unspecified number were "collections of materials from the wrong sources due to...