BREAKING! -- DoJ's OIG documents, and FBI admits -- to egregious abuse of patriot act §215 authority, and NSL authority!

last night, chairman john conyers
quietly released the 2006 reports com-
piled by the department of justice,
office of inspector general, on
FBI experience under patriot act §215,
the so-called business records
section -- and the FBI's so-called
"national security letter" search
authority in 2006. both of those laws,
as amended, contain a protection -- re-
quired by our first amendment -- that
no §215 request, nor NSL, will issue "solely for first amendment-
protected" expressions/activities
of any target -- most especially, u.s.
citizen-targets. now -- huge surprise! -- that
is exactly what the FBI did (in 2006), not
once, not twice, but three times -- finally
using an NSL (because NSLs require no
judicial pre-review whatsoever!). . .

the full PDFs are here (on
patriot act §215 authority) and here
(on the NSL authority) but this
image of page 73 tells it all [click to
enlarge the image!]:



note that when the FBI didn't like
the answer it got from the FISA court
judge, it simply marched forward, on
its own initiative, and sent an NSL,
without any additional fact-gathering.

why am i hot about this? well. . .

this blog would plainly be at-risk
in such scenarios -- and we should
all be screaming to our representatives
about these abuses -- as the FISA fight
resumes in earnest today. . . print
out, and send the-above image to your
senators, and representative(s).

U P D A T E D

here is page 142 from the 2006 NSL
report, which, on its face, makes a
case against telecom immunity. note
that, despite being ordered by the FBI not
to produce full content of e-mail messages,
in two cases, and not to produce the
subject matter lines, in two others,
the telecom company did so, and did
so repeatedly. in one case, the telecom
delivered the wrong person's phone
records, of its own error/negligence.

it is hard to imagine why there should
be no legal redress for such wanton neg-
ligence, here some six-and-a-half years
after 9/11. finally, note that it wasn't
until june of 2007(!) that the FBI gave
comprehensive guidance on these matters
to the FBI field agents. astonishing!

as ever, click to enlarge:



now -- go print, and fax
THAT one to your reps!

write "no immunity!" all
over that bad boy, too. . .

[page 133, et seq., of the NSL report
makes plain that the number of violations
reported have risen significantly in the
last two years, because the FBI is finally
actually reporting the violations. it is a
near-certainty, in the parsing of the OIG's
NSL 2006 report, that at least an equal or
greater number of abuses took place in 2002
through 2005 -- they just weren't reported.

in 2006, there were 84 reported
cases of NSL abuse -- sickening.]

p e a c e