It’s been a while, but “national security letters” (NSLs) are back in the news. The letters were originally created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, but were expanded under Bush, through the Patriot Act, to apply to almost anyone.
The WaPo had a very helpful article on NSLs in November 2005, which explained that the law now empowers the FBI to obtain secret information about Americans — including phone calls, internet visits, even credit ratings — whether they’re suspected of wrongdoing or not. Officials can probe personal information in total secrecy, literally forever. This information can be collected without the consent, or even knowledge, of a judge. And these letters are issued routinely, tens of thousands of times a year in the post-9/11 era.
There are, however, some laws and internal Justice Department regulations to regulate how the NSLs are obtained by law enforcement officials. And as it turns out, the FBI has been violating these limited regulations, too.
A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.
The inspector general’s audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations — some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293 “national security letters.” The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.
Keep in mind, more than 20,000 NSLs are issued each year, and the inspector general’s report was based on a small random sampling. The WaPo reported that officials believe that the known problems “may be the tip of the iceberg in an internal oversight system that one of them described as ‘shoddy.'”
Just what Bush’s Justice Department needed — another controversy in which officials may have broken the law.
Keep in mind, since 9/11, the standards for obtaining secret information about Americans have been extremely low. As the WaPo explained today, the FBI needs only to certify that the records are “sought for” or “relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” But DoJ officials, as often as 20% of the time, apparently weren’t even meeting this insubstantial threshold.
The result isn’t pretty.
… [Inspector General Glenn] Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed “exigent” circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.
In at least two cases, the officials said, Fine found that the FBI obtained full credit reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released. The FBI “sequestered” that information, a law enforcement official said last night, but did not destroy it.
Raise your hand if you’re confident that the Bush administration never misused the information it received improperly.