“We know we accidentally tapped the wrong phone and therefore can’t arrest the man with cancer we heard tell his friend he smoked pot. But since we did hear it, can we pretty please put a legal tap on his phone so we can bust this evil doing criminal?”

FBI Admits to Making Mistakes in Wiretaps – 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 bureau’s acknowledgment that it makes mistakes in some wiretaps — although not specifically roving wiretaps — came in a recent Justice Department inspector general’s report on the FBI’s backlog of intercepted but unreviewed foreign-language conversations.

The 38,514 untranslated hours included an undetermined number from what the FBI called “collections of materials from the wrong sources due to technical problems.”

One more catch-22 where the good of catching terrorists puts in place mechanisms that might come back to bite us in the future.