Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

FBI Wiretap Shut Off Due to Late Payment of Phone Bill

by Terrence O'Brien on January 14, 2008 at 10:10 AM

Late Phone Bills Cost the FBI Evidence
Well, apparently you can put a price on freedom. The same telephone companies that had no problem providing the government with unfettered access to voice and data passing over its networks in a series of questionably legal wiretaps will apparently tell the FBI no when it doesn't pay its bill on time.

An international wiretap was shut off by an unnamed company due to a delinquent bill, and may have resulted in the loss of evidence. This is not the first time the FBI has suffered interruptions in its surveillance due to late payments.

Two things make this story incredibly disturbing. The first is that the FBI, our nation's premier law enforcement organization, is so disorganized that it can't pay it sphone bills on time. And the second is that it took a late phone bill, not something like, say, the Constitution, for a phone company to finally deny the government a wiretap.

From Textually

Related Links:

Tags: fbi, government, law, phone bill, PhoneBill, politics, surveillance, wiretaps

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular