Particularly Blagojevich, who has been under at least a dozen federal investigations since 2005 and knew he was being wiretapped.
The largest number of episodes — 1,904 — appeared to be "roamers," in which a foreigner whose cellphone was being wiretapped without a warrant came to the United States, where individual warrants are required.
When the lawsuit was filed in 2006, the government argued that the charity and two lawyers who worked with it could not sue unless they knew the charity was being wiretapped.
Mr. DeLong emphasized that the majority of the 2,776 incidents — 1,904 of them, according to the audit — were in a category that did not involve Americans, but rather foreigners abroad whose cellphones were being wiretapped.
BEIJING — When Hu Jintao, China's top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis.
"Unless I get something real good [in exchange], shit, I'll just send myself, you know what I'm saying," Blagojevich said one day before Obama's election, unaware that he was being wiretapped.
Tensions were so sharp that agency officials said they suspected their phones, including Dr. ElBaradei's, were being wiretapped by American intelligence agencies, but no conclusive evidence emerged to back up the suspicions.
In an interview with Tempo, the country's most respected magazine, the police official said he knew he was being wiretapped and played along with the caller; in an allusion to the anticorruption commission and the police, he said, "It's like a gecko challenging a crocodile".
Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped.
It's not as if, say, a senator or member of Congress voted for the FISA law and then found out he or she was being wiretapped.
