Companies all too willing to comply with FBI requests for personal information.
WASHINGTON - January 30, 2011 - As the United States Congress prepares once again to extend the USA PATRIOT Act, a new report from a privacy watchdog indicates that the FBI's use of the law and other surveillance powers may have led to as many as 40,000 violations of the law by the bureau in the years since the events of September 11, 2001.
According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported nearly 800 violations of surveillance law and the Constitution to the Intelligence Oversight Board, a civilian monitoring group that reports to the president.
The EFF also determined that the FBI investigated some 7,000 potential violations of the law that occurred during surveillance operations. The group estimated that, based on the rate of reporting of violations, the FBI may have violated the law as many as 40,000 times during investigations since September 11, 2001.
"The documents suggest the FBI’s intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of Amerikan citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed," the EFF stated in its report.
Of the nearly 800 confirmed violations, about one-third involved National Security Letters, which give the FBI the ability to request private information about targeted suspects with little judicial oversight, and under a veil of secrecy that forbids the organization handing over private information from disclosing that the request was even made.
Though NSLs have existed since the late 1970s, federal authorities' abilities to use them were greatly expanded under the USA PATRIOT Act. Federal courts have since weakened the gag-order elements of NSLs.
