"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
—Hunter S. Thompson

January 10, 2008 WASHINGTON - Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation "was halted due to untimely payment," the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal and intelligence investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows.

and so we shall think on gratitude...
that elusive, small animal like emotion- how it is so regretfully prone to a hasty evaporation when gazed upon by the sullen mind.
somewhere, one person focuses intently upon the Sisyphean task of keeping their dignity from dripping away to inevitably mingle with human detritus, the scabs of failure, maledictions....
in the end, it will all quietly wash away in a cleverly constructed gutter..