The NSL, in place since 1986, allow the FBI to collect electronic records without court approval. In 2001, the Patriot Act removed requirements that such records belong to someone who was at least under suspicion, allowing the FBI to spy into the phone, bank and e-mail records of anyone, as long as agents believed they were “relevant” to ongoing investigations.
All the while, the government played innocent, offering reassurances with no substance: The power was important to the war on terror and was being used with due regard to fairness and privacy — and all for our own good, of course.
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He also found 48 violations of law and presidential directives between 2003 and 2005. Fine also estimated the FBI underreported how many times it used NSLs.
Fine called the lack of oversight, which he attributed to sloppiness and mistakes, a “serious and unacceptable” failure. Congress, meanwhile, told the FBI to shape up or lose its NSL authority.
Republicans said the FBI should be “ashamed” of its abuses, which were a violation of the trust implicit in Patriot Act powers. Democrats said the FBI’s actions seemed a willful attempt to circumvent privacy rights. And Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York called for a revision of the act, saying it’s not enough to simply ask the FBI to clean up its act.
It’s certainly refreshing to hear both parties saying, in effect, “wait a minute.” The hope is it won’t prove too little too late.
It’s reasonable to have fears, as the current administration hasn’t exactly proved it is trustworthy. The original Patriot Act was to sunset in 2005. It didn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be a threat to people with nothing to hide, but it is.
While some of the FBI’s errors might not have been malicious, the end result is the same: errors that compromises both rule of law and the spirit of fairness. Yet, had the Bush administration gotten its way — it opposed the audit requirement written into the newer Patriot Act — we’d still be in the dark.
Congress deserves thanks for its recent, if latent, showing of spine. We could stand to have more of that.
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