Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff this week floated an idea to start a nonprofit group that would collect information on private citizens, flag suspicious activity, and send names of suspicious people to his department.

The FBI says it sometimes gets the wrong number when it intercepts conversations in terrorism investigations, an admission critics say underscores a need to revise wiretap provisions in the Patriot Act.

The FBI would not say how often these mistakes happen. And, though any incriminating evidence mistakenly collected is not legally admissible in a criminal case, there is no way of knowing whether it is used to begin an investigation.

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-fbi-wiretap-errors,0,6521880.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

Federal law enforcement attempts to use cell phones as tracking devices were rebuked twice this month by lower court judges, who say the government cannot get real time tracking information on citizens without showing probable cause.

Another new alliance of strange bedfellows, calling itself the Liberty Coalition, sponsored Gore's speech and scrambled to construct a Web site.

Dedicated to "preserving the Bill of Rights, personal autonomy and individual privacy," the Liberty Coalition includes dozens of groups from across the political spectrum - such as the ACLU, Amnesty International, Mothers Against the Draft and Move.on Political Action on the left, and the American Conservative Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, the Free Congress Foundation and the National Taxpayers Union.

The groups are often at one another's throats over a crazy-quilt range of issues, from tax reform, civil liberties and cyber-piracy to budget restraint, gun control and anti-war protest.

Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, said gun owners should feel especially threatened by Bush's electronic surveillance.

True transformations in politics are as rare as palm trees in the Arctic Circle.

But Al Gore is that palm tree.

From Insight  magazine, owned by The Washington Times:

 "The sources provided guidelines to how the administration has employed the surveillance program. They said the National Security Agency in cooperation with the FBI was allowed to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of any American believed to be in contact with a person abroad suspected of being linked to al Qaeda or other terrorist groups.

"At that point, the sources said, all of the communications of that American would be monitored, including calls made to others in the United States. The regulations under the administration's surveillance program do not require any court order."