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FBI Violated Electronic Communications Privacy Act
An anonymous reader writes to tell us of a report from the Washington Post which alleges that the FBI "illegally collected more than 2,000 US telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records." The report continues,
"E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats. ... FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show."
Your tax dollars aren't being used to your benefit. Your never going to get propper health care when it's more profitable for politicians to sell you out to insurance companies for 'campaign contributions'
I can't even find out how much my insurance company will cover for a given procedure. They refuse to tell me until its to late.
But the FBI can break the law and spy on me all day...
When even the Supreme Court doesn't hold up the constitution as a valid basis there is not much that we can do except for revolt - but even if you get a critical mass to do that, they'll just stick the army on you or use near-lethal weaponry.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
This is exactly why we protect our civil liberties. A lot of people are willing to hand over exceptional rights to the government to make them safe from terrorism. The reason we don't do that is because the government abuses our rights. Proponents for strong government say it's a slippery slope argument, fortunately, we now have the evidence of wrong-doing to point back and show why rights need to be protected, and people responsible for abusing those rights should be severely prosecuted.
Some Judges need to let some guilty people walk to teach the FBI that they have to play by the rules. I don't know how often that happens in the USofA, but clearly it's not enough. I know that in Canada, it is not that uncommon to have evidence invalidated because of invalid collection technique.
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This is a false dichotomy. Giving away civil liberties does not equal more safety. There is much more that can be done to prevent crime and violence that would be much more productive than wasting time money and effort on wire tapping, and that is just legal wire tapping, not this.
Is anyone actually surprised by this?
You clearly have absolutely no fucking idea how unlikely you are to die in a terrorist attack, particularly in a pre-Patriot Act world. By your logic, we should all give up any semblance of freedom and have our government lock us away in cages to prevent automobile deaths.
I'd rather be dead then a slave.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
According to TFA, the US DOJ started investigating the FBI over this issue in 2006. Why aren't FBI agents in jail right now? And why didn't the Washington Post ask this question?
You sir, are an idiot.
The probability of getting killed by a terrorist attack is so low that it shouldn't be any valid excuse to give away your privacy.
Bend over if you'd like, but please let others fight for their rights.
"Post PS": "personal PC" is just wrong
I'd like to believe these are all good people, but sometimes even good people get carried away and need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law... to the top of knowledge and 1 more level of accountability.
Jail time is needed.
I've seen people fired for policy violations in the private sector. Anyone who knew about these violations needs to be fired even if they didn't actively participate.
The FBI needs to be cleaner than any other law enforcement agency in the USA. They haven't lost my trust, but they are headed that way.
Total number of Americans killed in Terrorist attacks in the last decade: ~3000 (No, soldiers fighting a way don't count)
Total number of Americans killed in car accidents in the last decade: ~400,000
I have to wonder what the benefit of having "the ability to travel" is if the end result is being killed in a car accident. Being alive is a prerequisite to enjoying travel, being dead means you'll never travel anyway. We should be preserving life now, as the most important first step, and we can focus on preserving our ability to travel later since we'll still be alive to work for it.
about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law.
'Technical violation of the law' is also known as 'crime.' The degree to which the law has been violated may be relevant for sentencing, but it's irrelevant in determining whether or not a crime has, in fact, taken place.
In true emergencies, Caproni said, agents always had the legal right to get phone records, and lawyers have now concluded there was no need for the after-the-fact approval process.
So how many of these were actually true emergencies? And having the legal right to get something doesn't excuse getting it illegally. If the police have probable cause they can get a warrant to search my house. If they decided to skip getting a warrant and search it anyway, the results of that search are inadmissible even though the police could have done it legally. It should be no different in this case. In fact, in this case there's a statute specifically defining the crime, and it does not excuse a criminal act if it could have been done legally but wasn't.
Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.
That's not a legally recognized excuse. The intent that matters is the intent to intercept the communication, which was plainly present (this is not a case of accidentally tapping the wrong line or anything like that). Whether they knew what they were doing was illegal or whether they thought what they were doing was justified is irrelevant in this case, per the statute.
Caproni said the bureau will use the inspector general's findings to determine whether discipline is warranted.
Discipline? I hope that's just for starters. The ECPA provides for a jail sentence of up to 5 years per violation, and I would like to see prosecutors pursue significant jail sentences for the "senior FBI managers up to the assistant director level" that approved the procedures for emergency requests, particularly for those who did so "for two years after bureau lawyers raised concerns and an FBI official began pressing for changes." They betrayed the public trust and broke the law even after their illegal behavior was pointed out to them. It's utterly inexcusable.
The federal government should also be made to pay the appropriate statutory civil fine to the parties whose phone records were illegally gathered, which is the greater of actual damages, $100 per day of violation, or $10,000. If $10,000 in statutory damages seems excessive, the government should take a look at the Copyright Act some time. And if 5 years in jail seems excessive, it should take a look at the penalties for growing certain plants in your back yard.
If someone has a gun to your head you're probably not very worried about the misquitos, why? Because the gun is a larger and more immediate danger. You are 2 orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack (and even those numbers are skewed by the largest terrorist act in our nation's history, the real value is probably closer to 3 orders of magnitude).
Yet we still invest hundreds of billions of dollars, give away our rights, and piss off the international community all in an effort to reduce deaths by terrorism. If we had put that same amount of money into things like high speed rail, improved roads, or enforcing drunk driving laws, we could have saved many more lives.
...for the Hope & Change that was promised to me. So far, BO seems a lot like GWB, but with better speaking skills.
In the event you are joking, my response is this: lulzwut?
In the event you aren't joking, my response is this: lulzwut?
Living With a Nerd
or enforcing drunk driving laws
It's interesting that you complain about a loss of civil liberties and then use drunk driving as an example of something that needs more attention. The war on drunk driving has infringed on many of our civil liberties. In no particular order:
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In one sense, all those attacks DID succeed. They achieved their aim of frightening America's government into imposing ever more infringements on the freedom of its people, and frightening Americans into accepting those infringements.
I didn't say "they hate us for our freedoms". They hate us for what we're doing to their freedoms (even if it's paradoxically the freedom to be restrictive of freedoms), and goading us into letting our government become more oppressive to its own populace is their revenge.
U.S. citizens are expected to comply with tens of thousands of BS laws and regulations that come out of Washington DC, and are regularly prosecuted for violating them. By contrast, government employees (from the President on down) violate the 15-20 pages of the U.S. Constitution on a regular basis, and nobody is arrested or prosecuted. Why should WE have to read, understand and obey the massive volume of rules that they spew out every year when THEY refuse to obey a very simple set of rules governing their behavior? I guess it depends on who is breaking the law.