For all that the New York Times wants to make this into a scandal, their own reporting of the story proves why it is not.

A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.

F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

So what we have here is not overreaching by government. What we actually have is human error. And let me be quite blunt -- as long as we have human beings involved in the process of collecting intelligence, there will continue to be human error. If the New York Times wants to make a scandal out of these occurrences it can try to do so -- but I think it will look pretty silly doing so when its own reporting indicates that these are not terribly common and not intentional misdeeds.

Posted by: Greg at 02:31 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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