Respect My Lack of Authority--FBI

According to a CNN article, which is condensed below:

The FBI continued in 2006 to badly mishandle letters that it uses to obtain personal records without a court order, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.

The new report shows the FBI continued in 2006 to increase its use of the secret letters. The 49,425 requests represented a 4.7 percent increase over 2005.

The new report cites "issuance of NSLs [national security letters] without proper authorization, improper requests and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records due to FBI errors or mistakes made by NSL recipients."

In an accompanying report the inspector general said the FBI made 47 requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to pursue business records. All requests were approved.

The report, however, singled out one classified case in which the FBI was turned down by the FISA court, and pursued the matter anyway. Although the details were blacked out in the report, the inspector general said Congress was provided a classified version of the report, which contains the information.

Note to FBI: Depeche Mode Not Only Violators

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 Post

An 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.

FBI Informer Set Up Ft. Dix Six?

From CNN

He railed against the United States. And then he helped scout out military installations for attack, offered to introduce his comrades to an arms dealer, and gave them a list of weapons he could procure, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

These were not the actions of a terrorist, but of a paid FBI informant who helped bring down an alleged plot by six Muslim men to massacre U.S. soldiers at New Jersey's Fort Dix.

The informant's role raises questions of whether the government crossed the line and pushed the six men down a path they would not have otherwise followed. (Watch how the suspects' trip to a video store led to the arrest )

It is an argument -- entrapment -- that has been made in other terrorism cases, and one that has failed miserably in this post-September 11 era. It could resurface today when six Muslim men suspected of plotting to massacre U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix appear in federal court Friday morning for a bail hearing.