[privacy] FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Via The Washington Post.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR200706130
2453.html

- - ferg

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Desktop 9.6.1 (Build 1012)

wj8DBQFGcOGuq1pz9mNUZTMRAvRPAKCLsFaqAJXznRTx05U7LBzIXC2rigCgrnwi
Br58kODgczkMSgqAvANpd7g=
=cSBu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----



--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
privacy () whitestar linuxbox org
http://www.whitestar.linuxbox.org/mailman/listinfo/privacy