F.B.I. sees more National Security Letters Abuse

From The Gavel

June 14th, 2007 by Jesse Lee

From the Judiciary Committee:

Conyers: New FBI Report Confirms “Worst Fears”

(Washington, DC)- Today, FBI officials briefed House Judiciary Committee staff on a new draft audit report detailing the bureau’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The briefing served to update and correct prior statements to Congress, since the release of an earlier Inspector General report. The FBI confirmed that they found more abuses in the use of NSLs than the IG’s report had originally found. FBI officials say they are launching a new compliance program as a result.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) had the following statement:

“The Patriot Act and its renewal was rammed through Congress with the repeated claim that there was not one instance in which the Act had been abused. We now know that information on law abiding Americans was illegally obtained and kept in secret files. This confirms some of our worst fears about what happens when you give the government too much power with too little oversight.”

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data
John Solomon, Washington Post - June 14, 2007

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.

The new 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. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

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.

Technorati tags: House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, F.B.I., NSL's, Justice department, patriot act

Send Scooter Libby to Gitmo

  I kind of like that idea, don't you? Since a judge has ordered that Libby must spend his time in the slammer I think that we should let him go to Guantanamo for his vacation. So do the fine people over at Act For change, it would seem.

  This group is always sending letters to our Senators and Congressmen with some very good ideas. Below is the letter that I have sent to my state Senators. Keep in mind that they are both Republicans, so this should go over real well!

Former President Bush called them the "most insidious of traitors." He was referring, of course, to those who reveal the identities of America's covert operatives.

Scooter Libby is a traitor and is being detained in jail while his appeals are being heard.  Why not send Libby to Gitmo? Unlike other people currently detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he's been convicted of his crimes in a court of law. You might say this is inappropriate -- but if it isn't good enough for Libby, then it isn't good enough for anyone.

I ask that you publicly call for Scooter Libby to be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- or, join fellow senators in co-sponsoring legislation to shut down Guantanamo.  Senator Feinstein has introduced legislation (S. 1249) that will require President Bush to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

You should sign on as a co-sponsor -- or publicly call for Scooter Libby to serve his sentence there.

I look forward to your response to my letter.

  That was sent to both Senator Elizabeth dole and Richard Burr here in north Carolina. Burr will probably get a little mad because he pretty much is a Bush brown noser.

Technorati tags: Scooter Libby, Gitmo, Bush, Elizabeth Dole, Republicans