It's a stretch to connect iconic bands to federal agencies, but the rest of the story is deadly serious. According to Reuters and the Washington PostAn internal FBI audit has found the agency violated rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data on domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The number of violations uncovered by the audit was far greater than those previously documented in a Justice Department report in March, the Post said.
The vast majority of newly discovered 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 Post said.
The agents retained the information in their files, which mostly concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities, according to the report.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the FBI's national security investigations since 2002, so the actual number of violations in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials told the newspaper in interviews.
The Justice Department audit found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.
Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved the provision of information by phone companies and other communications firms that exceeded what the FBI's National Security Letters had sought, the Post said.
No comments:
Post a Comment