Meanwhile, state and local prosecutors requested 1,751 wiretaps, more than triple the number in 1993.
Between 2001 and 2007, according to the inspector general's report, before the four STELLARWIND programs had all gained a legal legitimacy, the N.S.A. wiretapped more than twenty-six hundred American telephones and four hundred American e-mail accounts, and collected phone and Internet metadata from hundreds of millions more.
With more advanced communications technologies making wiretapping more complicated, the FBI doesn't want pay for doing so; it wants the communications companies to instead.
The Supreme Court has not decided a criminal case raising issues related to the authorization of a wiretap in more than 20 years, so there is a reasonable chance that it would consider an appeal by Mr. Rajaratnam.
Permission for wiretaps is more difficult to obtain.
He used it to justify the indefinite detention of "enemy combatants," illegal warrantless wiretapping and, more broadly, a never-ending war with no geographic boundaries.
Today, after the W.M.D. fiasco in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the National Security Agency wiretapping and more, the American people no longer have faith that this administration will not abuse the powers provided in the Patriot Act.
Security experts say the German debate over police surveillance of computers and the demands for legislation restricting the practice will increasingly be necessary across the globe as the kinds of communication captured through wiretaps shift more and more to encrypted programs like Skype.
Ramirez said that local authorities often prefer to have the FBI and the Justice Department carry out investigations and arrests because federal charges supersede Puerto Rico's constitution, which affords certain legal protections — for instance, obtaining wiretaps is more difficult — in excess of those found in American states.
But it means that there is no good reason to give in to demands that we weaken cryptography, put backdoors in communications networks, or otherwise make the infrastructure we depend on be more "wiretap friendly".
