As far as Republicans in DC are concerned, the timing for this couldn’t be worse. Just this week, Senate Republicans decided that it wouldn’t investigate the president’s warrantless-search program and agreed to a plan that would allow the administration to continue to circumvent FISA.
We also learned this week that ongoing domestic surveillance, which is supposed to be subject to strict oversight, has strayed from the rules on more than one occasion.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said.
While some of these instances were considered technical glitches, the report, from the department’s inspector general, characterized others as “significant,” including wiretaps that were much broader in scope than approved by a court and others that were allowed to continue for weeks or sometimes months longer than was authorized.
In one instance, the F.B.I. received the full content of 181 telephone calls as part of an intelligence investigation, instead of merely the billing and toll records as authorized, the report found. In a handful of cases, it said, the bureau conducted physical searches that had not been properly authorized.
Underlying much of the recent debate over domestic surveillance has been the element of trust. We should trust the administration to be responsible; we should trust intelligence agencies not to abuse the rules; we should trust Congress to keep the administration from going too far.
At this point, the reservoir of trust is running dry.