Can you hear me now? The same phone companies who, in the interest of national security, were eager to violate our rights to privacy and turn over private phone data (without the necessary court order) are now willing to stop that same surveillance because the feds didn't pay their bills on time.
The NYT has reported that a Justice Department audit has blamed lost wiretaps on the FBI's lax oversight of money used for undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000. A wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ''was halted due to untimely payment,'' the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used to allow non-court-approved eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.
''We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,'' according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.
The report released Thursday was a highly edited version of an 87-page audit that the FBI deemed too sensitive to be viewed publicly. The American Civil Liberties Union called on the FBI to release the entire, unedited audit. In a statement, the ACLU said, ''It seems the telecoms, who are claiming they were just being 'good patriots' when they allowed the government to spy on us without warrants, are more than willing to pull the plug on national security investigations when the government falls behind on its bills. To put it bluntly, it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when the FBI says the warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail.''
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