The President is Responsible for Illegal FBI Snooping

When a President uses every means available to circumvent law, the Bill of Rights, and International Treaties, he tacitly gives the go ahead for every arm of government to do the same. Bush is responsible for torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, rights abuses all over the world, and illegal snooping on American citizens by the FBI.
CNN.com

The FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday. The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters (NSLs), in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals -- such as financial, phone, and Internet records -- without court orders.


The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren't supposed to. As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said. "We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities," Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report. The audit said there were no indications that the FBI's use of the letters "constituted criminal misconduct."


The FBI has made as many as 56,000 requests a year for information using the letters since the Patriot Act was passed in October, 2001, the audit found. A single letter can contain multiple information requests, and multiple letters may target one individual.


The audit found that in 2004 and 2005, more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens. Letter used to track phone calls, FBI says FBI Director Robert Mueller said Friday that 90 percent of the letters are used to access phone records in helping to track U.S. contacts with suspected terrorists overseas.


Mueller took responsibility for the FBI's problems and said steps had been taken to eliminate them. "I am to be held accountable," he said, for failing to provide the proper guidelines, training and tools for agents working with the national security letters.


The inspector general's review identified "26 possible intelligence violations" between 2003 and 2005, 19 of which the FBI reported to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board, the audit said. Of the 26, "22 were the result of FBI errors, while four were caused by mistakes made by recipients of the NSLs," it said.


The audit also found problems with "exigent letters," which are supposed to be used only in emergencies when time may not permit the NSL procedure to be followed. The audit found exigent letters were not used in emergencies and gave the agency access to telephone records it should not have had. Mueller said Friday the FBI stopped using exigent letters in May 2006 after the practice was revealed. He said they were used to obtain information the FBI was entitled to but should have gained in other ways.