Patriot Act Subpoenas Are Suspect
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Law, The War On Terrorism
From some newspaper in New York City:
The Justice Department’s inspector general has prepared a scathing report criticizing how the F.B.I. uses a form of administrative subpoena to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.The report, expected to be issued on Friday, says that the bureau lacks sufficient controls to make sure the subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s prior approval, are properly issued and that it does not follow even some of the rules it does have.
Under the USA Patriot Act, the bureau each year has issued more than 20,000 of the national security letters, as the demands for information are known. The report is said to conclude that the program lacks effective management, monitoring and reporting procedures, officials who have been briefed on its contents said.
I’m with John Cole on this one…
Getting worked up about the ‘mistakes’ is misguided. The bigger problem is that this program exists in its current form, period.
And yet, will it go on in its current form?
Free people would like to know…
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 and is filed under Law, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 13th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
I agree with you, Just, that the important question is, “Will it go on?” But without widee publicity of this kind of story being told, nobody with the authority would try to get the law changed. Looks like public opinion still means something, after all.
March 13th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
The real question is not whether this individual program will go on, but whether or not there are dozens of other programs being conducted in secrecy that have yet to be leaked to the media…we’ve already seen so much unconstitutional behavior it is natural to assume we only have revealed the tip of the iceberg.
March 18th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Well, I guess the “will it go on?” question has been answered. They’re still over using and under reporting the use of national security letters