Besides whether this is illegal, another question is whether this is any effective, and more to the point, cost-effective. Taking into account that very major part of all law enforcement activities amounts to the phony "war on drugs", I think there's little doubt that these data mining projects are just another fraud and misuse of tax dollars. I guess, if 1/1000 of the funds spent on this was spent on fight with online fraud and spam, which amounts to 90% of all email traffic, the resulting public good would be 1000 times more.
To put this in perspective, here's practical fact. Two years ago someone stole the number of my credit card and placed some online orders. It was promptly detected, and the IP address of the thief was known. But the police (PD chief, no less) explained that even though they could find the criminal by the subpoena to the ISP, still they couldn't do anything because the crime occurred "in noone's jurisdiction". Now compare this reality to these monitoring efforts, and you see how bogus this is. Just another phony government project pretending to do good while having zero real outcome.
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