Democratic House chairman 'outraged' at report FBI may have violated surveillance law over 1,000 times

Democratic House chairman 'outraged' at report FBI may have violated surveillance law over 1,000 times

The Democratic Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties expressed outrage at a report about how FBI agents possibly violated a surveillance law over and over again while misusing the National Security Letter (NSL) authority vastly expanded by the Patriot Act.

In a front page story in Thursday's Washington Post, John Solomon reports, "An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions
in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism."

Solomon notes that the audit "covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews."

In a press release sent to RAW STORY, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who also co-chairs the bipartisan Patriot Act Reform Caucus stated, "Today's reports only heighten the clear need for fixes to the NSL authority. The Justice Department's Inspector General previously found wide-spread abuses of the FBI's authority to issue NSLs - we now know that the problems go much further than initially disclosed. From the beginning, I have said that unchecked power would lead to
rampant abuse. It's clear, yet again, that reforms are needed."

"These abuses by the DOJ and FBI have proven that legislative fixes are necessary," Nadler continued. "In the coming weeks, I plan on holding continued oversight hearings on the NSL authority as part of a series of hearing entitled, 'The Constitution in Crisis: The State of Civil Liberties in America.' I will also work with my colleagues to consider and craft legislation that would place adequate checks on the FBI's investigatory power."

Nadler added, "The new FBI guidelines regarding the use of NSLs fall far short of protecting the privacy of innocent Americans. It is not enough to mandate that the FBI fix internal management problems and record keeping, because the statute itself authorizes the unchecked collection of information on innocent Americans."

Excerpts from Post article:

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The vast majority of the
new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

FBI officials said the results confirmed what agency supervisors and outside critics feared, namely that many agents did not understand or follow the required legal procedures and paperwork requirements when collecting personal information with one of the most sensitive and powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security
Letter, or NSL.

Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- demands that are not reviewed in advance by a judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, requiring only that the bureau certify that the records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an investigation "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

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FULL WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE CAN BE READ AT THIS LINK