Wednesday’s Department of Justice report serves as a reminder of the necessity of an open and accountable federal government.  The report details how the FBI circumvented statutory requirements to obtain the phone records for over 2,000 people, including, journalists for The New York Times, and the Washington Post.

The USA PATRIOT Act has already made it easier for the FBI to obtain phone records through the use of national security letters (NSLs).  The NSLs do not need to show probable cause; they merely need to link to a current investigation.

The FBI then began using “exigent circumstance letters” to further speed up the process.  Using the “exigent letters” the FBI would request records by citing emergency circumstances, without establishing probable cause or a link to a current investigation.  While it is bad enough that this practice was supposed to be vindicated by issuing NSLs after the fact, in some instances NSLs were never issued at all.

Even more concerning are the instances where the FBI acquired phone records without any pretense of legal procedure.  The report reveals that some requests were made simply by asking for the records through phone conversations, emails, or hand-written notes.

One by one, legal safeguards for searches were tossed aside to facilitate intelligence gathering activity.  The fact that several reporters were investigated serves as a stark reminder as to why these safeguards exist in the first place.  In the end these efforts violated civil liberties, wasted the resources of the intelligence community, and embarrassed the FBI.

Tags: DOJ, exigent letters, FBI, national security letters, PATRIOT Act, surveillance

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Current Events, Opinion & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.