The FBI and telecom companies collaborated to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for four years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or by simply asking for them.
The Justice Department’s Inspector General’s internal audit released Wednesday harshly criticized how the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Communications Analysis Unit — a counterterrorism section founded after 9/11 — relied on so-called “exigent” letters to get carriers to turn over phone records immediately. The letters were a hangover from the investigation into the 9/11 attacks in New York and promised telecoms, falsely, that subpoenas would follow shortly.
And it gets better:The telecom employees were supposed to be responding to National Security Letters, which are essentially FBI-issued subpoenas. But those Patriot Act powers say the target must be part of an open investigation and that a supervisor has to approve it. While they require some paperwork, FBI agents have been issuing about 40,000 such NSLs a year.
But an AT&T employee provided the unit with a way around some of those requirements. The employee introduced them to so-called ‘exigent letters.’ Those letters, first used immediately following 9/11, asked for information by saying that the request was an emergency and that prosecutors were preparing a grand jury subpoena. The letter falsely promised that the subpoena, which gives the telecoms legal immunity, would be delivered later, the report said.
What’s more, the report noted that the cozy relationship between the bureau and the telecoms made it hard to differentiate between the FBI and the nation’s phone companies.
“The FBI’s use of exigent letters became so casual, routine and unsupervised that employees of all three communication service providers told us that they — the company employees– sometimes generated the exigent letters for CAU personnel to sign and return,” the inspector general reported.
In fact, one AT&T employee even created a short cut on his desktop to a form letter that he could print out for a requesting FBI agent to sign.
Even that became too much. Agents would request “sneak peeks,” where they’d ask if it was worth their time to file a request on a given phone number, the inspector general noted. The telecom agents complied. Soon it graduated to numbers on Post-it notes, in e-mails or just oral requests.
Many times the exigent letter or verbal request for telephone records turned up areas worth opening a more detailed investigation. In some cases, they showed the agent that a full-blown wiretap was necessary, the report said. But permission for listening into a suspected terrorist’s phone calls has to come from the nations’ secret spy court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
But how do you get a search warrant when the evidence you have to support it came from an illegal request? How do you explain to a judge you got your probable cause illegally?
You don’t. You “make false statements” in your affidavit. That’s what agents did in order to use the poisoned fruit of these secret searches, according to the report.
Years later — after the inspector general’s earlier reports on the exigent letters, the National Security Division investigated a few of the affidavits, found the “false statements” and told the FISA court about the lies.
But the Justice Department said in the report that false statements don’t matter — the wiretap orders from the FISA court remain usable even if evidence is acquired unlawfully, the report noted.
How the hell can the Obama administration legalize a violation of the Constitution? :shock:The Obama administration retroactively legalized the entire fiasco via a secret ruling from the Office of Legal Counsel nearly two weeks ago.
Nawww - goodbye Obama. Removal from office.mike said:The Obama administration retroactively legalized the entire fiasco via a secret ruling from the Office of Legal Counsel nearly two weeks ago. How the hell can the Obama administration legalize a violation of the Constitution? :shock: Goodbye 4th Amendment. :evil:
