By LOUISE RADNOFSKY, GARY FIELDS and JOHN R. EMSHWILLER

For years, the public face of federal law enforcement has been the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Today, for many people, the knock on the door is increasingly likely to come from a dizzying array of other police forces tucked away inside lesser-known crime-fighting agencies.

They could be from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor or Education departments, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency known for its weather forecasts.

Agents from NOAA, in fact, along with the Fish and Wildlife Service, raided the Miami business of Morgan Mok in 2008, seeking evidence she had broken the Endangered Species Act trading in coral.

The agents had assault rifles with them, and the case documents indicated her house and business records had been under surveillance over a six-month period, says Ms. Mok. Under the 1973 law, the departments of Interior and Commerce (home to NOAA) must write regulations to define what is endangered and how it must be protected. One of those regulations specifies coral.

“I felt like I was being busted for drugs, instead of coral,” Ms. Mok says. “It was crazy.”

Ms. Mok says she showed that her coral had been properly obtained. She paid a $500 fine and served one year of probation for failing to complete paperwork for an otherwise legal transaction.

Adam Fetcher of the Department of the Interior, which includes Fish and Wildlife, says the department and its bureaus “follow priorities in line with other federal law-enforcement agencies. We work within the resources appropriated by Congress to effectively follow up and investigate criminal and civil violations.”

Government agencies of all stripes have become the front-line enforcers for many of the laws Congress has written the past four decades. Not only do the agencies enforce these laws, they also write the voluminous regulations needed to put the laws into effect and govern federal programs.

Often, Congress makes it a criminal offense to violate any part of a law it passes—including these regulations. As a result, as more criminal laws are passed, the number of regulations that can ensnare people grows as well.

It is hard to pin down precisely how many regulations could result in criminal penalties. Of dozens of federal agencies contacted by The Wall Street Journal, none could say how many of their regulations were connected to criminal statutes. Legal experts have put this number at anywhere between 10,000 and 300,000.

In 1970, the Code of Federal Regulations had 54,000 pages. Today it runs to 165,000 pages and takes 27 feet of shelf space when printed and bound.

The growing rule book has kept enforcement teams busy. Last year, criminal cases pursued chiefly by smaller government agencies led to 10,122 convictions, an 84% increase from 15 years ago. Also up sharply: the numbers of prosecutions and investigators.

In the latest survey, by the Government Accountability Office in 2006, there were 25,000 sworn officers in the smaller government agencies (which excludes departments more commonly associated with crime fighting: Treasury, Justice, Defense and what is now Homeland Security). That number includes police, inspectors, security guards and rangers, as well as criminal investigators.

Across all government agencies, there were about 138,000 federal law-enforcement officers that year, GAO figures show. The Justice Department accounted for more than 40% of that total.

Among the smaller agencies, currently there are 3,812 criminal investigators, up from 507 in 1973, the first year for which records are available from the Office of Personnel Management. The EPA received its first two criminal investigators in 1977. It now has 265.

Even critics of the system say it is important to uphold the law and that criminal sanctions are sometimes necessary. “There are cases that should and can be made,” says Roger Marzulla, a Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who oversaw environmental-crime prosecutions. Enforcing regulations also ensures that rule-breakers don’t have an unfair advantage over competitors, he says.

An August raid on Gibson Guitar Corp. has drawn heavy criticism from both sides of the political aisle. In that raid, Fish and Wildlife Service agents swarmed the Nashville company to seize rosewood and ebony the agency suspected had been illegally imported from India. The company says its wood was obtained legally and that no charges have been filed.

“Why is it we’re treating what is essentially a violation of rules and regulations in a criminal manner?” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group.

Steven Benjamin, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which tends to be more liberal, says: “Enforcing over-criminalization has put us at war with ourselves.”

Skeptics also say some of these smaller departments tend to wield their powers indiscriminately, even for seemingly minor infractions, in ways that seem self-justifying.

“When you start making innocuous actions crimes, you multiply the number of people who are enforcing” the laws and regulations, says Ronald Gainer, a former Justice Department official for Democratic and Republican administrations who has cautioned for years against the proliferation of federal law. “You multiply the number of people who have to enforce criminal laws and they all want guns.”

Congress provides relatively little oversight, particularly in comparison to the FBI, whose officials are regularly brought before hearings. Committees overseeing federal departments not traditionally associated with crime-fighting pay less attention to their law-enforcement units.

Often, it is the agencies’ own internal inspectors-general who blow the whistle on problems with other officers in the department. In a stinging 2010 report, the inspector general for the Commerce Department focused on widespread complaints from fishermen in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Florida that criminal investigators from NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service’s Office of Law Enforcement were being heavy-handed, even in civil cases.

The report detailed a 2006 case where a warrant affidavit for a fish dealer’s records contained false information, and another case where an agent gained unauthorized access to a facility, then opened another door to let other officers in.

“The reality is that if you hire a cadre of criminal investigators, they’re going to carry out their work like criminal investigators—and that’s what they did,” says inspector general Todd Zinser.

NOAA officials say the agency has improved its enforcement program since the report, with new leadership and more scrutiny of charging decisions. It has also frozen hiring for criminal investigators and employed more officers to help fishermen with compliance.

“I think that we agreed that there was a need for a more balanced perspective in the makeup of our work force,” says Eric Schwaab, Assistant Administrator for Fisheries.

Christopher Kortlander met two dozen agents from several different federal agencies when they burst into the tiny Custer Battlefield Museum he founded in Garryowen, Mont., in 2005.

Mr. Kortlander has said in court filings protesting his treatment that “24 or more federal agents, armed and brandishing automatic weapons” participated in the raid. In an interview, he said he counted agents from the Bureau of Land Management, FBI, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and several other forces. One of Mr. Kortlander’s interns was pushed to the ground in the raid, he says.

The agents sought artifacts they said were being sold online under false pretenses as historical items found at Little Bighorn, scene of the bloody 1876 battle between Indians and the U.S. Army. No charges were brought against Mr. Kortlander. But agents returned in 2008, that time alleging Mr. Kortlander was in illegal possession of eagle feathers.

Again, no charges were filed. Mr. Kortlander denies wrongdoing. In 2009, federal prosecutors took the rare step of notifying Mr. Kortlander’s attorney in writing that it wouldn’t be pursuing charges in connection with either raid.

Mr. Kortlander is suing the government in federal court to recover some Cheyenne bonnets taken by the Bureau of Land Management during the second raid.

“They raid these people like they’re Scarface,” says Penelope Strong, Mr. Kortlander’s attorney. Using force to go after drug dealers or violent criminals is understandable, Ms. Strong says. “But somebody in a hot, sultry part of Montana, in a trading post where people are wandering around buying blankets? Come on.”

The agencies referred inquiries about the case to the U.S. attorney’s office in Montana. A spokesman declined to comment, citing the lawsuit.

Postal inspectors, customs and other revenue agents were some of the first federal law-enforcement officers in the years after the Revolution. In the 19th century, Congress created forces to guard federal buildings and to police the expanding American West. After the Civil War, the federal government set up the Department of Justice and stepped up controls of immigration, alcohol and drugs.

The Department of the Interior and the Forest Service received new responsibilities under the environmental legislation sought by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century. But the foundation for the current growth of federal enforcement agencies was laid in the 1960s and 1970s when smaller departments started having inspectors general whose task was to police the government. Lawmakers writing sweeping environmental laws in that era also granted additional resources to the agencies administering those laws. That, in turn, created new enforcement teams.

Lawmakers and traditional law-enforcement agencies, in particular the FBI, resisted extending the power to carry firearms, execute warrants and make arrests to other agencies, says Jeffrey Bumgarner, a professor of government at Minnesota State University who has written a history of federal law enforcement. But agencies chipped away at that opposition, he says.

EPA agents were given police powers in 1988. The U.S. Marshals Service started issuing annual blanket authorizations in 1995 to some agencies that didn’t have them.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the FBI’s attention shifted to terrorism matters, Congress gave permanent powers to inspectors general in more than two dozen agencies.

All of the officers are trained at one of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center facilities now run by the Department of Homeland Security. About 90 federal agencies send their personnel to the centers for training in everything from criminal investigations to cyber terrorism and land-management police training.

In the mid-1990s, many agencies tried to scale back their vigor in pursuing criminal prosecutions amid concern among members of Congress about aggressive tactics. An influential 1994 memo by Earl Devaney, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s criminal-enforcement program, suggested applying criminal sanctions to only “the most significant and egregious violators.”

Mr. Devaney’s advice didn’t stick, and the numbers are rising. In 2010 there were 12,606 prosecutions from cases investigated chiefly by agencies other than Justice, Treasury, Defense and Homeland Security. That was a 50% increase from 15 years ago.

In September, former oil-refinery manager Hubert Vidrine Jr. was awarded $1.67 million from a malicious-prosecution lawsuit he filed against the EPA. The judge said she would have made it higher if not limited by federal law. Mr. Vidrine’s troubles began in September 1996, when the agency’s criminal-investigation division led nearly two-dozen armed federal and state authorities on Canal Refining Co., an oil refinery in Church Point, La.

Mr. Vidrine described in an interview a scene of guns, police dogs, flashing lights and roadblocks. At one point, according to court documents filed in the lawsuit, agents refused to allow female employees to use the bathroom and prevented them from phoning their homes or child-care providers to make arrangements for their children.

The plant, which employed about 260 people, shut down refining operations the following year and is idle now.

Mr. Vidrine was charged in 1999 with “knowingly” storing hazardous waste, which later turned out to be used refined oil not covered by federal regulations. The potential penalty was five years and a $50,000 fine for each day of the violation. The case was dismissed in 2003, by which time Mr. Vidrine had spent more than $120,000 in legal fees maintaining his innocence, according to a statement by the judge.

The lead EPA agent in the case pleaded guilty Oct. 3 to charges he lied under oath and obstructed justice. A few days earlier, federal judge Rebecca Doherty sided with Mr. Vidrine in his lawsuit.

The EPA declined to comment, citing potential further action by the Justice Department. In recent weeks the Justice Department filed a notice that it plans to appeal the case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—promising to push a case that began in 1996 into 2012.

The regulations that spurred the raid were so complex they had led to disagreements among EPA personnel, as well as state environmental quality personnel, the judge noted in her opinion. She called the regulations a “morass.”

Judge Doherty wrote that, “Given the egregious conduct displayed by an agent of the government and the devastation wrought on otherwise law-abiding citizens,” she would have given Mr. Vidrine more than $1.67 million, if federal law allowed punitive damages against the government, “in the hope of deterring such reckless and damaging conduct and abuse of power in the future.”

—Kris Maher contributed to this article.

Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com, Gary Fields at gary.fields@wsj.com and John R. Emshwiller at john.emshwiller@wsj.com

Por LORETTA CHAO e AMIR EFRATI, de Pequim

A Twitter Inc. anunciou que passou a poder selecionar o conteúdo disponível para os usuários de seu serviço de acordo com o local onde estão, e planeja usar esse recurso para entrar em países com “ideias diferentes” sobre a liberdade de expressão como um direito humano — num exemplo dos problemas éticos enfrentados pelas empresas de internet.

O comunicado, publicado no blog oficial do site de microblogs, informou que o Twitter pode agora impedir que usuários de um país específico tenham acesso a um conteúdo, mas permitindo que continue disponível para o resto do mundo.

A iniciativa ressalta os obstáculos enfrentados pelas empresas de internet à medida que seus sites ficam mais globais e interconectados em vários países, e elas precisam cooperar com visões diversas sobre controle do conteúdo da internet. Para sites como o Twitter e a rede social Facebook, isso significou bloqueio em países como a China, onde a internet é censurada.

“Enquanto continuarmos crescendo internacionalmente, chegaremos a países com ideias diferentes sobre os contornos da liberdade de expressão”, afirmou o comunicado, que acrescentou que o conteúdo nazista é proibido na Alemanha. Mas a empresa informou que ainda não empregou o novo recurso.

O Twitter informou também que vai notificar os usuários quando censurar os tweets. “Se e quando formos obrigados a censurar um tweet”, ou texto do microblog, “num país específico, tentaremos avisar ao usuário, e vamos deixar bem claro quando o conteúdo foi bloqueado, e o por quê”, informou.

O Twitter vai colaborar com o site de defesa da liberdade na internet Chilling Effects, que compila avisos de bloqueio de conteúdo, para divulgar essas informações. Essa prática dificultará ao Twitter operar na China, onde executivos de internet dizem que palavras-chave proibidas são tratadas como segredos de estado.

A empresa não informou os países em que planeja usar o novo recurso, mas afirmou que pode não ser uma solução que agrade a todos. Alguns países “diferem tanto das nossas ideias que não há como existirmos lá”, afirmou o Twitter, numa referência implícita a países como a China, que baniram o serviço.

A China é o pais que tem mais internautas no mundo. As empresas locais de internet empregam dezenas ou centenas de censores para policiar diariamente o conteúdo criado pelos internautas, e são obrigadas por lei a tirar do ar por períodos variados uma lista atualizada frequentemente com palavras-chave banidas, inclusive as que clamam por ações políticas de cunho pacífico.

A gigante da internet Google Inc., que operou quatro anos na China cooperando com as exigências de censura, tomou há dois anos a decisão polêmica de parar a censura no país e transferir seu site de buscas em chinês para Hong Kong. A decisão foi motivo de muita discórdia dentro e fora da empresa, e até entre os defensores da liberdade na internet, com alguns acreditando que qualquer censura é antiética, e outros aceitando que ter uma presença na China, mesmo que censurada, no fim ajudaria a liberalizar o fluxo de informação no país.

Há dois anos que o Twitter é bloqueado na China por tecnologias de filtragem da web. Alguns usuários mais leais usam ferramentas para se esquivar da censura e acessar o site, mas a maioria dos blogueiros da China usa hoje em dia serviços locais, como o da Sina Corp. e da Tencent Holdings Ltd.

By JASON CHOW

Philip Jeyaretnam says that being the boss at Singapore’s oldest law firm is limiting his literary ambitions. The 47-year-old lawyer—whose late father was a leading opposition politician in Singapore—took over as managing partner at Rodyk & Davidson LLP in January.

Rodyk & Davidson LLP

Philip Jeyaretnam

He says the demands of running the firm—which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year—have impeded his other career as a fiction writer. “My next novel will have to wait until I’m done with being managing partner,” says Mr. Jeyaretnam, who has already published two novels, both set in his native Singapore, and several collections of short stories.

Mr. Jeyaretnam says he wants to grow Rodyk’s business beyond the city-state. Currently, the firm’s only office outside Singapore is in Shanghai, though Rodyk claims specific expertise in Indonesia and India. It currently has 170 lawyers in its Singapore office, a number it hopes to increase to 200 by 2013.

But building a stronger regional presence is a challenge—there’s tough local and international competition across Asia, while regulations in many Asian countries can restrict access for foreign legal firms. Mr. Jeyaretnam recently spoke with The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Chow about the legal landscape in Asia. The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: How does your writing affect your legal career, and vice versa? Mr. Jeyaretnam: They both feed off my interest in stories. As a lawyer, it really isn’t just about the arguments. It’s about what the real story is and how I get it across to a judge. It’s similar to being a writer: You have to be interested in what’s happening in people’s lives and a desire to structure it into a story.

WSJ: What are the main challenges for a local Asian law firm like Rodyk & Davidson trying to expand regionally?

Mr. Jeyaretnam: First, the jurisdictions across Asia, for the most part, remain protected legal silos. But, secondly, the level of cross-border and international transactions, is increasing. Thirdly, Asia still remains culturally diverse and fairly traditional, so having an understanding of the specific culture of a particular place remains important.

WSJ: How has the legal profession in Asia changed in your 23 years as a lawyer?

Mr. Jeyaretnam: From the early 1990s, China leapfrogged other Asian jurisdictions by being open in allowing foreign law firms to practice their own foreign law in China. That transformed the landscape. If you asked people in the 1980s about the Chinese legal profession, it didn’t even exist at that point in time. The second thing has been the growth of international transactions. There’s greater activity by financial institutions and funds in projects outside of their own countries. There’s this convergence of standards and structures around the world. Also, there’s been an increase in using arbitration as a dispute-resolution method. This has attracted English and American law firms. If you looked at the Asian landscape in the mid-1980s, you wouldn’t see such a strong presence among international law firms. What we haven’t seen is a really strong Asian multi-jurisdictional law firm. The big question is whether those Asian law firms who practice in the cross-border space, like Rodyk, can overcome the regulatory silos and actually achieve real scale as regional firms.

WSJ: What’s the best way to understand the application of the law in different countries in Asia?

Mr. Jeyaretnam: You can’t assume things operate the same as they do at home. You look for sources of information and understanding to reduce the risk of being blind-sided by ignorance of how a place works beyond the laws that are on paper. If you only talk to lawyers in a particular place, you’ll get a certain restricted view of things. If you talk to a lawyer in Vietnam or Indonesia, you’ll be quoted what’s in the statute books. But apart from being a lawyer, I’m a writer and I have contacts with other writers and artists. Sometimes, to understand a country like Indonesia, for example, it’s just as valuable to talk to an Indonesian journalist as it is to an Indonesian lawyer. It’s important to keep your sources open.

WSJ: How do you help international clients understand the uneven approach to application of business law in some Asian countries?

Mr. Jeyaretnam: There aren’t any easy answers. We’ve reached the stage for some aspiring economies in Asia where this issue is probably a key barrier to future investment and prosperity. Essentially, it’s a big tax on doing business and it’s holding countries back. I can’t promise a magic wand. You hope for the local knowledge that will get you through, but you appreciate that the other side has accumulated knowledge too. This is particularly an issue in Indonesia and India. If you enter into a contract and something goes wrong, you’ll find yourself getting an arbitration award but struggling [to get it enforced because of] derailing applications in the courts. The opportunities for businesses outweigh [the uneven legal systems], but just imagine how much better the economy can do if you solve this sort of problem so that people doing business don’t have to worry so much when they risk their money.

WSJ: What are the challenges to Rodyk’s regional ambitions?

Mr. Jeyaretnam: One, international law firms can strengthen their positions so that the firms that come from smaller jurisdictions, like our own, will be squeezed from above. Secondly, we have some very powerful economies in Asia—China, Indonesia, India—and the latter two remain jurisdictional silos. They don’t allow foreign law firms to directly practice in those countries. [Local firms] are building on the increased economic activity in their own jurisdictions and we could get squeezed by those firms too.

By BY TOM HERMAN

Q: Will the Internal Revenue Service be allowing taxpayers a sales-tax credit for purchasing a new vehicle in 2011 like they did last year?

P.C.A., Roseville, Calif.

A: The specific law you’re asking about isn’t available for 2011.

But that isn’t the end of the story. You may be able to benefit from another law that’s very much alive. Since this is a tricky issue, even by tax-law standards, here is some background.

Our reader—and two other readers—are asking about a now-defunct federal income-tax provision originally designed to encourage people to buy new cars and other vehicles. It was enacted by law, not handed down by the Internal Revenue Service, and it wasn’t a “credit.”

Although that specific break now is dead, there is another law that can help many people—as long as they itemize their deductions, says Mark Nash, partner, personal financial services, at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas.

Under that law, taxpayers have an unusual choice. They are allowed to deduct general state and local sales taxes paid, instead of deducting state and local income taxes paid, he says.

“This can be a great tax benefit” for many taxpayers who live in Florida, Texas and other states that don’t have a state income tax, Mr. Nash says.

Picking the sales-tax deduction can be a smart move for many people in other states, too, such as taxpayers who make large purchases during the year (including a new vehicle) and who owe very little in state and local income taxes.

“But this is only for taxpayers who itemize,” Mr. Nash says. It doesn’t help those who claim the standard deduction.

Calculating how much to deduct can be complex.

Taxpayers have a choice in how to figure the amount. They are “allowed to claim the actual sales tax they paid, or they can choose to deduct an amount from a table provided by the IRS that varies based on [a person's] state of residence, income level and number of dependents claimed,” says Mr. Nash.

“If you use the tables,” he adds, “you are allowed to add to the table amount any general sales taxes paid on a vehicle purchase” or on certain other items, such as a home improvement.

For tips and guidance on calculating the sales-tax deduction, go to the IRS website . For example, check out this page: “Sales Tax Deduction Calculator—Frequently Asked Questions.”

***

DEATH AND TAXES: The federal estate-tax exclusion is scheduled to increase next year, thanks to an inflation adjustment. For an estate of someone dying in 2012, the basic estate-tax exclusion amount will be $5,120,000, says the IRS. That’s up from $5 million for 2011.