Congress: We Didn't Know the FBI Was Creating a Small Surveillance 'Air Force'

Errorcod3 sends a followup to last week's news that the FBI is operating a fleet of planes across the U.S. for surveillance purposes. A new article in The Atlantic points out that Congress is claiming to have had little or no awareness the fleet was being built, and is asking for answers. Quoting: Senator Charles Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, demanded to be briefed (PDF) no later than this week on "the scope, nature, and purpose of these operations and what legal authorities, if any, are being relied upon in carrying out these operations." Sixteen House members wrote to the FBI (PDF), pointing out that the president had just signed a reform ending the bulk collection of phone records. "It is highly disturbing," they wrote, "to learn that your agency may be doing just that and more with a secret fleet of aircraft engaged in surveillance missions." They asked for the FBI to identify the legal theory used to justify the flights, the circumstances surrounding them, the technologies on the aircraft, the privacy policy used for data collected, and the civil liberties safeguards that had been put in place. Senator Al Franken has posed ten questions of his own (PDF) to the FBI.

Comments

You know what else sucks?

[sootman]

Seeing the same video bytes -- which I am not going to watch anyway -- EVERY TIME I scroll down the page.

Re:An honorable sense of tradition...

[rtb61]

So it seems the real problem with the FBI like so many other US government agencies, is how the Head of the Organisation is appointed and how much power they have.

It seems pretty much a screw up to allow one single head of the FBI with all that power. Likely much like another board appointed to oversea application of the law, 'a jury'. Rather than one person with all that enormous power, appointing 12 persons with proven experience and appropriate qualifications to manage and control the organisation according to law, makes a lot more sense.

Creating the requirement that 12 people must sit down to craft and apply policy means a solid record of discussion and validation must exist prior to any policy being applied and this enables government to review those policy decisions. Each of those 12 appointees would also hold other leadership roles within that government organisation. Consider how much better various organisation like the NSA, CIA, DOD, would run if all policy discussion and decisions were required to be public. There is absolutely no reason for one person to have total control of those organisations, it makes no sense at all and is extremely dangerous and has routinely been abused by that one person.