Fonegate only part of fed spying; it gets worse, much worse.

New York Daily News - World & National Report - Fonegate part of fed spying:

"WASHINGTON - The federal government's massive grab of nearly all the nation's phone records was just a small part of a vast array of official 'data mining' projects whose legality has come into question.

In two reports since 2004, the Government Accountability Office said 52 of the 128 government agencies surveyed had either carried out or planned such projects - resulting in 199 separate efforts to collect information.

Five of the agencies - including the FBI, State Department and Internal Revenue Service - failed to comply with federal privacy and communications safeguards in their efforts to track terrorists and catch criminals, the GAO said.

The failures 'increased the risk that personal information could be improperly exposed or altered,' the GAO reports said of the searches for patterns, trends and relationships in huge databases."