FBI Repeatedly Broke Law In Phone Record Searches

The FBI, the federal government's central law enforcement agency, has been found to have been engaged in illegal telephone surveillance activities.  According to the Washington Post, the transgressions began shortly after the passage of the Patriot Act and occurred throughout 2002 to 2006.

The USA Patriot Act, an omnibus bill of police state "must haves" enacted literally weeks after the September 11th 2001 attacks, permitted law enforcement agencies to search a home or business without the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge; expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, including library and financial records; and expanded the use of National Security Letters, which allows the FBI to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order.  It is this latter attribute in which the government, even when receiving carte-blanc authority to monitor its citizens with virtual impunity, determined that existing restrictions on its actions was too much.  The historical record of civil rights abuses and criminality conducted by American law enforcement against innocent civilian groups is well established.   For example, in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was enacted in response to Watergate era civil rights violations and revelations that president Nixon and other administrations had authorized warrantless surveillance of political opponents and activists.

In the stated period, the FBI monitored over 2,000 US telephone conversations under the pretense of terrorism emergencies that did not exist.  The tactic was not limited to Americans with ethnic-sounding names, but used to survey a wide swath of persons that the government was interested in; such as the press.

The FBI’s spying on journalists without any link to known cases of terrorism suggests that the journalists were the victims of political intimidation and retaliation by the FBI for exposing illegal government programs. Ellen Nakashima has written extensively on domestic wiretapping and government intrusions into privacy, while Raymond Bonner’s articles include exposes on detainee abuse and illegal surveillance.

The Washington Post article outlines that the FBI violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when it collected phone records without linking the investigations to “emergency terrorist threats.”  A Justice Department probe of the situation is anticipated to find that the bureau routinely violated the law.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

Over-and-over we are told that "innocent" mistakes on behalf of government police agencies resulted in these illegal searches.  However, it is obvious from the development of events, as described in the WaPo article, that these actions were not undertaken to protect the nation from terrorists, but to advance the statist objectives of the Bush junta, so that they could effectively control and extinguish political opposition to their increasingly criminal pursuits.