Trouble is, in most cases, those cookies on government Web sites were unauthorized - they violated specific, unambiguous federal rules. And nobody's exactly sure how it happened or how widespread the problem is. We can make some pretty good guesses, though. After all, we're technical people. We know how techies think.
Cookies are technology.
Technology is a good thing, and it's much more important than rules. In some cases, outside contractors may not even have known about the no-cookies rules. And at one site that was run by a private contractor, the contractor's agreement even gave the private company rights to all the data collected from cookies. The rules just disappeared from their radar. They were inconvenient, and in the rush to the Web, they just got brushed aside.