Meh, not like the NYT has ever gotten a story wrong before now is it? Seriously though, there are situations, I believe, where this could be entirely legal- what will need to be seen is if the cases that it was done under match that narrow view or if they did not.

It does seem odd that they would do this without permission, since the court having jurisdiction in this matter is practically a rubber stamp and rarely denies government requests. I think I'm going to wait for more facts to come out on this before I pitch in building that scaffold to hang them from that you're all working on.