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Audit Finds FBI Abused Patriot Act
happyslayer writes to mention that according to Yahoo! News a recent audit shows that the FBI has improperly and in some cases illegally utilized the Patriot Act to obtain information. "The audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that FBI agents sometimes demanded personal data on individuals without proper authorization. The 126-page audit also found the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances. The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct. Still, 'we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,' the audit concludes."
What are the chances that anyone will ever - ever - be arrested over this?
I mean, seriously does anybody really feel any surprise at all when reading this ?
...
And if so what drug are you on
Law enforcement agencies will abuse any law to get the maximum leverage that they
can, it does not matter that the laws they use were not originally intended for
the purpose they are being used for.
In NL we only recently got the obligation to carry ID, ostensibly to fight heavy
criminals that would not ID themselves. Of course now you can get arrested a
lot easier for say being a jogger and having no ID on you.
And that has already happened to a lot of people, but not to the so called heavy
criminals.
if you want to stop this trend I'm afraid it will take a lot more than a vote in
a ballot box at some point.
if that is still possible...
MP3 Search Engine
Funny. I seem to recall a lot of screaming about the possibility for abuse and I distinctly recall being told to shut the fuck up, we can *trust* them to do the right thing.
pfft.
Run. I like water. Push My rutabaga.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I guess, maybe we can't trust those in power.
Welcome back, Tricky Dick!
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
According to GW Bush, "They hate our freedoms." I guess he figures if we get rid of our freedoms, they'll quit hating us. Nothing else makes much sense.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The simple fact is that human nature tends to cause us to use power whenever we can. This is the reason that there are checks and balances in our government. Some smart guys realized a few hundred years ago, that a position with unchecked power will eventually be abused by a person seeking personal gain.
This is a fact.
This is a truth of humanity.
Laws such as the patriot act, which remove checks and balances and allow individuals or small groups of like-minded individuals to act unilaterally in a way that is damaging to the rights of other citizens is a gross violation of this principle and is evidence to a loss of touch with what our government is put in place to do.
While protecting the people is a primary goal of a government, protecting the people must weigh protections both on the freedom and liberty of people against the PHYSICAL protection of people.
Unfortunately, our society is so sheltered from physical trauma, we have grown risk-averse in a disturbing way.
A few hundred years ago, when most people did not reach 60, and 1/4 of children died before adolescence, we had a realistic view of how important liberty is in our society. People dealt with death and destruction, as it was part of nature. Liberty, however, was not a constant and had to be protected at all costs.
Today, people take liberty for granted and so fear death and destruction that they will throw away their liberty for temporary saftey.
This is the trap which our founding fathers warned us against. They saw its power and also its danger.
We need to open our eyes to that truth as well.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Welcome back, Tricky Dick!
The tactics (and some of the players) never really left, they've only refined the techniques and the spin to explain it away to an apathetic public. At least Nixon stepped down when he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
LOL how often have we heard conservatives sniping at people who object to the expansive, unchecked powers of the Patriot Acts? Now do you understand what "nation of laws not a nation of men" means? This is why you don't give the government totalitarian powers (even if it's your party) and turn your back expecting them not to be abused. Let the March of the Frogs begin!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
So all the people who regularly point out how much "better" a society Sweden is than the US, either have to: - entirely backtrack - agree that domestic surveillance really ISN'T that big a deal - just be hypocrites. (grabs some popcorn) OK, let's start discussing!
Ain't that the truth. I was surprised to learn earlier this week that Rumsfield and Cheney were both in the Nixon Whitehouse.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
I both agree and disagree.
I think that people with FEDERALIST leanings are more to blame. Isolated pockets of socialism are not damaging when they are confined. At that point, it becomes a choice, rather than an obligation. For example, if California decided they wanted welfare, excelelnt. It is the nationwide push for such things that cause problems.
Our country was designed (and was most efficiently operated) as a loosely coupled federation of states. The federal control extended to ALMOST nothing, except where it concerned one state accepting the laws of other states and where it concerned international trade, commerce, war and diplomacy.
In this structure, if California becomes corrupt with power, you are free to move to Oregon. Presumably, there would develop a certain state of homeostasis between locations as like minded individuals move together and learn to inter operate with other groups of unlike minded people.
On the far other extreme end from your socialist comment lies a society of laissez-faire corporate oligarchy, not seen since the "oil baron" days of entire cities, owned, policed and supervised by corporate regulations and institutions, where corporations oppress citizens in exactly the same way, from exactly the opposite direction.
Surely there is a balance in the middle?
Regardless, the balance must be approached seperately by a number of smaller state governments, rather than centrally by a bureaucratic federal dictatorship.
Stew
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
The Moral is:
Never give the government a power that you would not feel comfortable in having your worst enemy exercise.
(Because someday they will)
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
It was created to restrain the terrible power of government from abusing the sovereign rights of the people.
Government is the worst invention of man. It has created the most terrible acts of all history and has only one tool at its command.. that is force. If you try to say no to a government you will eventually be fined, if you don't like the fines, you will be put in a cage, and if you try to resist the men that come to put you in one you will be killed. Your rights are not granted to you by any such government. They exist outside of government, so a piece of paper can not fully define what rights you have. (The Constitution itself even says that)
*WE* do not control government anymore. We are the governed. We don't limit it anymore.. we just roll over on our rights, and its entirely run away.. but that's ok because since the people of the country understand so little of what freedom and liberty mean.. anything else they could come up with now would be WORSE. (can you imagine if congress had to re-write the bill of rights now??)
If the people fail to understand that government must be limited.. it matters very little what pieces of paper we have or who controls what office.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
The insurgency that is dying is the one that began 230 odd years ago, against a distant King in England, by a ragtag group of people who believed in liberty. What kind of country we have now, if our citizenry can be so scared by the loss of couple of skyscrapers and surrender the freedoms so quickly?
The insurgency led by Geroge Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers is really in its last throes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not all abuse is the same, and we should be clear here as to what the FBI actually did and didn't do. A good analogy here is that an FBI agent using their service firearm to unjustly shoot and kill a civilian is different from FBI agents failing to keep track of which agents have which guns and make sure they return them when they leave the agency. One case you expect criminal prosecution and the other case you'd expect some administrative action.
Same here. No one is alleging that the FBI used these Patriot Act powers outside of their intended purpose. What the FBI didn't do, that they should have, was properly account for the letters they did use, specifically, properly count the number used, and properly follow up with the recipients of the letters.
So yes, if FBI agents were using this power to get information that the law was not designed for them to get, then I'd expect criminal prosecution. But, as it appears is the case, the FBI just didn't properly ACCOUNT for the letters they did use, an administrative penalty seems perfectly sufficient to address the problem.
That all, of course, is separate from the issue of whether this law should exist at all (it shouldn't).
paintball
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Since the first rule of National Security Letters is not to talk about National Security Letters, then ya, it will be a good while till you hear an actual example.
Or did you mean that surveillance, eavesdropping, searching and financial snooping aren't violations of fundamental, inalienable rights? If that's the case, I won't argue. If we can't agree on what's fundamental, there's nothing really to discuss. BTW, can I have your SSN?
I am not a crackpot.
Don't drag Cheney into this. Yes, he was hunting again, but he was hundreds of miles away when Captain America was shot.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
The spokesperson of the Justice department has conceded that abuses have occurred. He categorized them as being ``small in number'' and asserted that ``it appears'' that no harm was done to either individual persons or corporations.
So your analogy isn't very apt; it's more like a police bureau not only not tracking the issuing of bureau firearms to officers but saying that it didn't keep track and in a large number of situations they have been fired in situations that did not warrant that extent of force but that situations where intent was malicious were small in number and that it doesn't look like any innocent bystanders were hit.
Read the government's own report on the matter. The incidents categorized as ``improper'' fit the analogy you brought up. These are incidents where the appropriate paper work simply wasn't done or was done incorrectly. But there are also incidents categorized as ``illegal.'' These are incidents where the FBI retrieved email, phone records, or financial information in an illegal fashion. The report lists four incidents of this type. This says to me that any FBI agent presently has the ability to get almost any information he or she desires. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the report had detailed disciplinary actions taken against the agents responsible for these abuses.
But of more concern to me are the nineteen incidents where the recipient of the letter responded with information outside the scope of the letter that was (in most cases) illegal for the recipients to furnish without a court order. It isn't just the FBI at fault here, it's also the telecoms, ISPs and credit bureaus who are abusing their positions of power.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, as a result of FBI abuses including targeting of dissident groups, new laws were passed and court decisions occurred putting restrictions on the FBI and on state and local police because of agency misconduct. Consider Bull Connor and his thugs at the Birmingham (Alabama) Police, who felt the appropriate response for peaceful protests was attack dogs and firehosing. We did not 'hobble' them because we wanted to let criminals get away with things, we put restrictions on police because they could not be trusted not to abuse their authority.
You didn't get decisions like Miranda , Escobedo , Mapp , and others because it was thought that it would be a good idea to make the job of law enforcement more difficult, but because law enforcement was acting in an improper and often illegal fashion. Depriving police of the ability to use illegally obtained evidence, of suppressing forced confessions and other such things would, it was claimed, destroy law enforcement. And you know what happened? Police officers learned, generally, to act within the rules, to be professional and to work on finding evidence in a proper manner. But it still wasn't enough.
The Govenor of Illinois had to commute the death sentences of over 150 because of police and prosecutorial misconduct, including cases where prosecutors sought death sentences and sent people they knew were innocent to death row. The incident was so bad that some prosecutors were arrested for misconduct.
There is an old saying in Latin, Quos custodes ipsos custodes?, i.e. Who will watch the watchers? When the police don't have serious restrictions, they will do anything they can get away with. Sometimes the police act properly and in a professinal manner. Sometimes the police can be almost as bad as the people they are supposed to catch.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.