Paging Senator Rockefeller

by: Carnacki

Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 09:27:31 AM EST

Paging Senator Rockefeller. Senator Jay Rockefeller to the illegally bugged white courtesy phone, please.

No one - except, you know, us dirty hillbilly bloggers and pretty much everyone else - could have predicted this:

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews.

...

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

But I'm sure it was all in emergency circumstances when there was no time to apply for legal warrants to do this, right?

FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said in an interview Monday that the FBI technically violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act when agents invoked nonexistent emergencies to collect records.

"We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said. The after-the-fact approvals were a "good-hearted but not well-thought-out" solution to put phone carriers at ease, she said. In true emergencies, Caproni said, agents always had the legal right to get phone records, and lawyers have now concluded there was no need for the after-the-fact approval process. "What this turned out to be was a self-inflicted wound," she said.

The story goes on to say the agents were working "under stress" to stop terrorist attacks. The problems with that kind of rationalizing are that it allows for lazy investigators to take unnecessary shortcuts and those who do not safeguard liberties in the name of security are surely to not have or deserve either.