Today’s Must ReadEvery day it’s something new. Today it’s the Justice Department’s Inspector General who throws more gasoline on the bonfire. From The Washington Post:
A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.The inspector general’s audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations — some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293 “national security letters.”…
Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed “exigent” circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.
The PATRIOT Act, of course, gave the FBI an extraordinary amount of flexibility in seeking information without the nuisance of probable cause. The bureau only need certify that the records are “sought for” or “relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”
“In 2005 alone,” the Post reports, citing the audit, “the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information.”
But the FBI apparently ignored even those flimsy requirements. The most glaring abuse appears to concern the so-called “exigent letters”:
The report identified several instances in which the FBI used a tool known as “exigent letters” to obtain information urgently, promising that the requests would be covered later by grand jury subpoenas or national security letters. In several of those cases, the subpoenas were never sent, the review found.The review also found several instances in which agents claimed there were exigent circumstances when none existed. The FBI recently ended the practice of using exigent letters in national security cases, officials said last night.
Just a coincidence that they ended the practice right before the IG’s report was released, I guess.
As a result of the laxity with NSLs, the FBI seems to be swimming in personal information: “In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released.”
Now, although officials tell the Post that the “known problems may be the tip of the iceberg in an internal oversight system that one of them described as ‘shoddy,’” the inspector general’s report apparently states that these were not “manifest deliberate attempts to circumvent statutory limitations or departmental policies.” In other words, the FBI agents didn’t know they were breaking the law or the rules. What’s worse, they apparently didn’t care enough to check.
Update: The Post reports:
Members of Congress vowed today to conduct investigative hearings — and consider reining in parts of the Patriot Act — following revelations of pervasive problems in the FBI’s use of national security letters to secretly obtain telephone, e-mail and financial records in terrorism cases.