Meet The Legally Allowed Mob: Your Government
John R. Emshwiller and Gary Fields write for the WSJ about a woman's story I've blogged about before -- marine biologist and whale-watching boat operator Nancy Black, who was charged with lying to the feds about..."whale harassment."

When federal prosecutors can't muster enough evidence to bring charges against a person suspected of a crime, they can still use a controversial law to get a conviction anyway: They charge the person with lying.

The law against lying--known in legal circles simply as "1001"--makes it a crime to knowingly make a material false statement in matters of federal jurisdiction. Critics across the political spectrum argue that 1001, a widely used statute in the federal criminal code, is open to abuse. It is charged hundreds of times a year, according to court records and interviews with lawyers and legal scholars.

...The trouble began in October 2005. During a whale-watching trip, a humpback whale approached one of her boats. The captain began whistling, hoping the noise might keep the creature from leaving, according to Ms. Black. A crewman on her other boat, which Ms. Black was captaining nearby, also urged passengers to make noise, she says. (Neither the captain nor the crewman faces charges.)

The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 outlaws "harassment" of whales that could disrupt their behavioral patterns or injure them. Ms. Black says she doesn't believe the whistling, or the ships' closeness to the whales, violated the rules, particularly since the creature had approached on its own.

Ms. Black says she considered the whistling "unprofessional" and told her employees not to do it again. She says the then-wife of her boat captain then went to the government to find out if there was anything wrong with whistling on the boat. The now former captain declined to comment. His ex-wife couldn't be reached for comment.

Several days later, Ms. Black says, a federal official from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration--a Commerce Department agency with duties ranging from weather forecasting to fisheries management--made an informal request (as opposed to a subpoena) for her to provide video of the whistling incident. She provided a video edited to show the captain's whistling, she says, because that is what she thought the investigator wanted to see. She didn't include video of the other crew member allegedly egging on passengers to make noise.

The indictment alleges Ms. Black altered the video "with the intent to impede" investigation of the whale incident and then falsely told authorities the video was "the original recording, when that recording had in fact been altered." She acknowledges editing the video and denies that it was altered to impede the probe. In interviews, she denied lying about the video and has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

She says she gave the edited video to two officials, including a NOAA investigator, and went through the video with them. A NOAA spokesman declined to comment on Ms. Black's case.

About a year later, on a morning in November 2006, more than a dozen federal agents, led by a NOAA inspector, entered her house with a search warrant and took away her files, photos and computers, she says. "It was the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me."