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FBI Finds It Overstepped Bounds in Collecting Data
truthsearch writes with a link to a Washington Post article about an eyebrow raising internal FBI audit recently released to the public. The document finds that, contrary to a document release back in March, the FBI frequently overstepped its bounds in collecting data on US citizens. The article states that the organization may have violated laws or agency rules 'more than 1,000 times'. "The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002. 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. But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents' requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have."
Every FBI agent who asked for/took information not legally allowed should be sacked immediately, they either don't know the law they are enforcing or are deliberately breaking it themselves. No excuses, they should be sacked. With ten thousand offences (1000, but only 10% sample was taken) The management should be removed and replace. Maybe this would give a proper signal of what the people expect of their law enforcement and show to the people that criminal activity isn't tolerated anywhere.
They either do this, or the populace should not feel under any compulsion to comply with any laws at all, or pay taxes, this is because the government has a responsibility as well as the individual, if the government has shirked its responsibiity no citizen can be expected in return to have any responsibility to the government.
I know this seems extreme but in the long run it would be the right move giving a good precedent and restoring a large amount of faith in the system.
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.
Isn't this along the lines of me handing you a 20 for a 10 dollar bill, leaving your place of business only to return with the police proclaiming that you overcharged me?
While the 2 dozen or so counts of obtaining information by request that they didn't have rights to is very valid I find these other charges kind of dubious.
It turns out that of that 1,000 incidents, 700 of them were from people at the companies sending too much (unrequested) information, not from over-intrusive FBI snooping. A few of the incidents had the agents sending out new letters requesting permission to use the extra info, but pretty much all of them were just discarded or filed away without anyone going through them (because you know someone would want to have a record of what was received, not what the agents actually wanted or used).
So out of that "1,000" it turns out to be 300 or less.
Because, as the article notes, it was "suspected" violations, not proven or even substantially indicated ones.
And this is out of what, almost 50,000 pieces of info requested? And that includes things like credit reports and other semi-public records - it's not like they're digging really deep for most of this. You get more investigation when you apply for a job with many companies.
A much less than 1% error rate is pretty damned good...