News: FBI audit shows it violated NSL law more than 1,000 times

The Washington Post today has posted this article: FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect. The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.

Your USA Patriot Act at work. The government got its wish list for domestic surveillance then treated, and still does, the Constitution like it no longer matters. Who polices the FBI?

Where do we go to get our rights back? Not Congress. Maybe the courts? Too little, too late.