Constitutional Law

FBI Ignored FISA Court Ruling on Access to Records

We previously discussed a New York Times story on four years of privacy abuses by the FBI, and today's Washington Post adds more information. Specifically, according to a recently released 187-page DOJ Inspector General report, after the FISA Court twice rejected an FBI attempt to obtain records, the FBI issued a national security letter (which circumvents court review and are approved only by FBI officials) on the grounds that the FBI's general counsel "disagreed with the court's conclusions." The Court had denied the request because "the 'facts' were too thin" and the "request implicated the target's First Amendment rights."

The Washington Post noted that nearly 60% of the 50,000 national security letters issued by the FBI in 2006 targeted Americans. The Inspector General was reported as saying that there are "hundreds of possible violations of laws or internal guidelines in the use of the letters, including cases in which FBI agents made improper requests, collected more data than they were allowed to, or did not have proper authorization to proceed with the case."

According to Wired, the DOJ also used blanket subpoenas to "retroactively . . . justify the FBI's acquisition of data through the exigent letters or other informal requests," in other words, information obtained "through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests."

Full post as published by ACS Blog on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).