The ACLU Would Like To Remind You That The NSA Isn't The Only Three-Letter Agency Abusing The Rights Of Americans

from the the-NSA-gets-all-the-'glory'-while-the-FBI-has-all-the-fun dept

The ACLU would like to remind Americans that, while the NSA has been truly awful, it hasn't completely cornered the market on overreaching surveillance programs and civil liberty trampling. As it points out, the initial leak from Ed Snowden dealt with a bulk phone records court order that was issued jointly for the NSA AND the FBI.

The FBI may seem like a silent partner these days, but it too has its own history of excesses, abuses and overreach.

Since 9/11, the FBI has once again transformed itself into a domestic intelligence agency with the unprecedented power to peer into the lives of ordinary Americans and secretly amass data about people not suspected of any wrongdoing. Through laws passed by Congress, such as the PATRIOT Act, as well as revisions to internal investigative guidelines meant to curb the abuses of the past, the FBI now has the authority to investigate and collect information on Americans without any evidence that they've committed a crime.

With so much power, the result was predictable.

Over the last 12 years, FBI agents have abused the new powers they were given to unfairly target immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and political dissidents for surveillance, infiltration, investigation, and disruption. Specifically, the ACLU has uncovered and documented persistent abuses, including warrantless wiretapping, racial and religious profiling, biased counterterrorism training materials, politically motivated investigations, abusive detention and interrogation practices, and misuse of the No-Fly List to recruit informants.
There's a ton of info in the ACLU's report, and while most of it isn't new, it's still a very thorough breakdown of systemic abuse in the investigative agency. Unlike the NSA, the FBI doesn't necessarily have to take a hands-off approach to Americans or their data. If anything, the FBI is a bigger threat to American citizens and their civil liberties because its domain is primarily the US.

The FBI and NSA are nearly indistinguishable in terms of post-9/11 behavior, as the paper's introduction points out.
[M]odern technological innovations have significantly increased the threat to American liberty by giving today’s FBI the capability to collect, store, and analyze data about millions of innocent Americans. The excessive secrecy with which it cloaks these domestic intelligence gathering operations has crippled constitutional oversight mechanisms. Courts have been reticent tochallenge government secrecy demands and, despite years of debate in Congress regarding the proper scope of domestic surveillance, it took unauthorized leaks by a whistleblower to finally reveal the government’s secret interpretations of these laws and the Orwellian scope of its domestic surveillance programs.

There is evidence the FBI’s increased intelligence collection powers have harmed, rather than aided, its terrorism prevention efforts by overwhelming agents with a flood of irrelevant data and false alarms. Former FBI Director William Webster evaluated the FBI’s investigation of Maj. Nadal Hasan prior to the Ft. Hood shooting and cited the “relentless” workload resulting from a “data explosion” within the FBI as an impediment to proper intelligence analysis.
Lack of oversight? Excessive secrecy? Too much data? The FBI has all the same bad traits as its security counterpart.

Here's some more from the report.

In 2008, the US Attorney General granted the FBI permission to utilize investigations called "assessments" which required no predicate and granted the agency power to conduct these as though they were actual investigations and use all the tools normally available. The FBI was only too happy to take the AG up on his offer.
In a two-year period from 2009 to 2011, the FBI opened over 82,000 “assessments” of individuals or organizations, less than 3,500 of which discovered information justifying further investigation.
Beyond these 82,000 fishing expeditions, the FBI also misused National Security Letters in order to bypass the very minimal restrictions its data collection efforts were subjected to.
A 2007 Inspector General audit revealed that from 2003 through 2005 the FBI issued over 140,000 National Security Letters —secret demands for certain account information from telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and credit agencies that require no judicial approval — almost half of which targeted Americans.
The FBI's abuse of the NSLs goes even further than the fact that the agency nearly continuously wrote itself blank surveillance checks for three straight years. The ACLU notes that the agency so thoroughly abused the program that it truly had no idea how many letters had been issued. An audit of the program also found that 60% of the audited files had no supporting documentation and that 22% contained at least one unreported legal violation.

A second audit report in 2008 failed to find any signs of improvement, but it did uncover signs of an agency trying to cover its tracks.
High-ranking FBI officials improperly issued eleven “blanket National Security Letters” in 2006 seeking data on 3,860 telephone numbers, in an effort to hide that the data had been illegally collected with “exigent letters."
"Exigent letters" being only one of the means the FBI used to illegally acquire data. The report goes on to mention the infamous Post-It notes and other collection methods… like reading over a telco employee's shoulder.

It's all in this report. The spying on journalists. The racial profiling. The investigations of activist groups. The ACLU even makes a note of a report that shows the spirit of J. Edgar still lives on in certain agents.
In a document that reads as if it were written during the Hoover era, an FBI agent describes the peace group Catholic Worker as having “semi-communistic ideology.”
Post-9/11, the agency became unstoppable, even considering the excesses of the Hoover era.
During the FBI’s relentless investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, for instance, The New York Times reported that several people falling under suspicion lost jobs, were placed on watch lists, had citizenship and visa applications denied, and personal relationships destroyed. The FBI publicly hounded bioterrorism researcher Steven Hatfill for over a year, following him so closely with up to eight FBI surveillance cars that one of them once ran over his foot. FBI officials later acknowledged Hatfill was completely innocent, and the Justice Department paid him $4.6 million in damages.

The FBI then turned its sights on another researcher, Bruce Ivins, who suffered a mental breakdown and committed suicide.
The FBI, like the NSA, is also very proud of its haystacks and haystack-building programs.
An FBI budget request for fiscal year 2008 said the FBI had amassed databases containing 1.5 billion records, and two members of Congress described documents predicting the FBI would have 6 billion records by 2012, which they said would represent “20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States.
And despite all of this data, terrorists continued to slip through the FBI (and NSA's) grasp. The House Homeland Security Committee pointed out shortly after the Boston Bombing that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the sixth terrorist attack by a "person previously known to the FBI or CIA."

And as the FBI seeks out new sources of data to add to the billions of records it's already drowning in, it's continuing to lie and obfuscate in order to grab more and hold onto it longer.
A tax fraud prosecution in Arizona revealed that the FBI has been failing to inform judges about the particularly invasive nature of “Stingray” devices when it seeks to obtain court orders for location information…

The ACLU of Northern California obtained Justice Department documents showing the FBI has been obtaining pen register orders—which authorize the government to obtain telephone numbers called from and received by a particular mobile device based on a relevance determination—to obtain location data using IMSI catchers, without telling the magistrate judges that this invasive technology would be used.
As was stated earlier, much of what's included here has been uncovered before, but the ACLU's comprehensive report leaves no stone unturned (and no footnote unlinked) in its takedown of an agency whose actions over the last decade have become increasingly abusive.

The FBI doesn't deserve to be let off the hook simply because the national debate on civil liberties and safety is mainly focused on the NSA's actions. It has proven to be just as careless in regards to respecting the rights of Americans and just as bold in its overreach.

Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: abuses, civil liberties, domestic surveillance, exigent letters, fbi, national security letters, nsa, surveillance
Companies: aclu


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it
    identicon
    out_of_the_blue, 19 Sep 2013 @ 8:52am

    Yeah, now add just about every "LLC" too...

    You just CANNOT understand the modern world without including corporations in fairly open fascism. So I must conclude that you do NOT understand the modern world, that you're living in a "laissez-faire" fantasy ignorant of fairly recent history in which US corporations used actual machine guns to control their workers. It's happening again, though of course they prefer more subtle methods.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 20 Sep 2013 @ 9:42pm

      Re: Yeah, now add just about every "LLC" too...

      Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

      In point of fact, you really can ignore the corporations in this equation. Thus, fascism is not the troll you are looking for. Corporatism would be what you are looking for, as it is the control of a state or organization by large interest groups.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    wto605 (profile), 19 Sep 2013 @ 9:51am

    But what about the four letter ones?

    I heard from a Brazilian friend that some "NASA" agency is doing some pretty nefarious spying too.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Ninja (profile), 20 Sep 2013 @ 4:03am

      Re: But what about the four letter ones?

      Well, the FBI spies within the US borders, the NS spies within the Earth borders and the NASA spies the outer space. Seems reasonable =/

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 19 Sep 2013 @ 10:06am

    you mean there are more of these '3 letter agencies'?

    yet another secret that's been kept from us!!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Theoden, 19 Sep 2013 @ 10:36am

    Three Letter Agencies?

    NSA and FBI. CIA? OMG! WTF???

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Uriel-238 (profile), 19 Sep 2013 @ 11:51am

    FBI, CIA, LSD, LBJ.

    LBJ took the IRT down to Wall Street USA. When he got there, what did he see, but the youth of America on LSD.

    I'm sure the CIA also appreciates the spotlight-drawing antics of the NSA as well.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Michael Price, 29 Sep 2013 @ 8:27am

      Re: FBI, CIA, LSD, LBJ.

      But that's not why this stuff was revealed. Don't get paranoid. I'm sure the CIA would never throw a fellow agency under the bus to get it's funding.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Monsuco, 19 Sep 2013 @ 12:04pm

    The creepiest 3 letter agency is still...

    the IRS. The NSA and FBI might try to gather data about you, the IRS demands that you gather your data for them and will prosecute you for getting it wrong.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    M. Alan Thomas II (profile), 19 Sep 2013 @ 9:32pm

    In a document that reads as if it were written during the Hoover era, an FBI agent describes the peace group Catholic Worker as having “semi-communistic ideology.”
    I'd say "semi-socialist" would be more accurate, but the real problem is that neither of those things is illegal or suspicious.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    geral, 22 Sep 2013 @ 11:25am

    fbi's phony hunt for & creation of domestic terrorists

    The Story Of Our Millenium Is Waiting For You to Break


    Mass Murder Caused By fbi/police Who Exploit For Publicity (via *DEW assaults) Macabre Disasters

    High tech assaults contribute to incidents of mass murder, etc.



    See my reports in the links below with evidence that the fbi, media, and others pretend that high tech assaults on Targets don't exist and that anyone who claims to the contrary is crazy.
    The current public media campaign to label (and thereby fraudulently discredit) the shooter 'Aaron Alexis' as one who simply hears voices, one who claims to be assaulted by microwave, etc, is a fraud perpetrated by the fbi.



    The truth is that the fbi regularly uses high tech weaponry against their political Targets for the following purposes, inter alia:
    cause sleep deprivation; drain energy from the Target's body; induce mood swings; force suicide; murder the Target.


    When the Targets breaks down the police and the fbi claim, "See we told you so"; then the thugs with badges lock up the Target in prison or in a hospital where he is left for dead after brain cells are rearranged. Here are my reports and documentations over the past twenty years regarding a similar and largely unsuccessful campaign against me in efforts to silence me from reporting high crimes by the fbi/police:


    My affidavit:
    http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/affidavit2007.html


    *High tech assaults, Directed Energy Weaponry (DEW):

    http://rudy2.wordpress.com/synthetic-telepathy-and-psycho-electronic-weapon-tortures-by-100000-fbi /


    http://www.sosbeevfbi.com/hightechassau.html

    http://austin.indymedia.org/article/2013/09/18/high-tech-assaults-arron-alexis-or-others



    or:

    http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/473316/index.php
    fbi crimes against me in efforts to silence me:



    and:



    http://austin.indymedia.org/article/2013/09/14/summary-fbi-crimes-against-me



    http://www.s osbeevfbi.com/part4-worldinabo.html

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.