For four years in a row now, Congress has gotten a report that the FBI has violated the law. They abused FISA laws, they overused National Security Letters. And at the time, the ruling GOP did diddly squat. The ruling GOP fell in lock-step with the Bush administration, and allowed agencies like the FBI to violate the law, and your privacy.
The FBI acknowledged it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.
[...]An audit by the inspector general last year found the FBI demanded personal records without official authorization or otherwise collected more data than allowed in dozens of cases between 2003 and 2005. Additionally, last year’s audit found that the FBI had underreported to Congress how many national security letters were requested by more than 4,600.
Ah, but don’t you worry your pretty (or empty) little head over these abuses against your 4th Amendment rights. These abuses have supposedly been curbed.
The inspector general’s report is expected to find that the F.B.I. has made “significant progress” in handling the problem, that it is committed at the highest levels to fixing it, but that it is still too early to determine the results, the official said.
“This is something we’ve taken very seriously and done a lot of things,” the official said. “It certainly hasn’t dropped off our radar screen.”
Except, this all appears to be an attempt to begin whitewashing the upcoming report. We are meant to believe that the FBI is really trying and the cynic in me is screaming.
Mr. German said the F.B.I., through Mr. Mueller’s pre-emptive release of the inspector general’s findings, appeared to be trying to shape the public perceptions to its own liking. “The F.B.I. is trying to turn the page on this without acknowledging the scope of the problem,” he said.
If we look into the recent past, we should remember that the DOJ KNEW of the NSL abuses by the FBI, and did nothing.
