Um, probable cause?

Last November, his lawyer wrote a letter to the FBI. In it, GOP political operative Roger Stone's attorney, Paul Rolf alleged that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer "used the services of high-priced call girls" while in Florida, basing his information on a "social contact."

The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Stone gleaned the information from "a social contact in an adult themed club."

"The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services," Rolf wrote. "It is Mr. Stone's understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer."

It continued, including particular detail -- Stone's lawyer wrote that the governor hadn't taken off his calf-length socks "during the sex act."

It's unclear whether Stone's letter sparked the investigation: court papers say the investigation began "in or about October 2007."

The New York Times reported that law enforcement officials "stumbled upon" the prostitution ring after they'd begun an investigation of Spitzer for potential corruption, after a bank flagged "suspicious transfers."

Abusing the Patriot Act

This isn't a surprise. This is what we all feared would happen. And this is only what's been reported. Conventional wisdom says there's so much more behind the scenes.

From the Washington Post Service and posted on the Miami Herald Web site:

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of 52,000 people and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.
The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.

This information didn't come out an expose, but from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General.

The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general to produce over the Justice Department's objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau's 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.

Consider the numbers of "potential terrorists":

Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 -- involving a total of 24,937 U.S. persons (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters requested telephone subscriber information on 11,100 separate phone numbers.

And:

The IG's report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI's use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found those offices had ''significantly'' underreported how many requests they made, and that in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher.

The results?

The tens of thousands of data collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the report. About half of the FBI's field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.