Saturday, March 10, 2007

Snooping on you

Well it seems that the FBI has been gathering all sorts of information on people and not taking care of it properly:
Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.


This story in the Post gives the details. The bottom line it seems is that agents were not following the rules to go and get someone. They were not following the rules because they were being sloppy. Gee what does this remind you. The use of national security letters to get information was under reported and it seems not even properly cateloged so if it did produce something useful would be linked to a specific case.

As the story notes:
The FBI also did not keep correct records of the investigations to which these requests were linked, according to the inspector general's report. Its agents did not always obtain the correct, internal authorization for those requests; they made typographical errors in listing key telephone numbers and e-mail addresses; they sought information the laws did not permit them to have; and they were given little to no policy guidance on what they could request or when to report mistakes and abuses, the report said.


Once again common sense seems to go out the window in the Bush administration. Here is this important information and there are no rules or guidelines on how it is to be cataloged. It seems there was also little if no quality control. And one wonders what happened to those people who's information got screwed up. And another thing one the info is collected it seems there is no procedure to purge bad or no longer useful information. So you have an ever growing badly managed data base which over time will become completely useless.

And the report goes on:

The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general's report. About half of the FBI's field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.

Commercial firms and institutions, which face court action and contempt fines if they do not comply with data-collection requests, were generally exceptionally eager to do so, the report said.


The bottom line seems to be a big huge waste of time. It begs the question what the FBI could have been doing to really making sure it got the bad guys.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, apologized for the abuse and has said that steps have been taken to make sure this does not happen again. And why exactly should we believe that anything has been done. And then this from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

"People have to believe in what we say," Gonzales said. "And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it's frustrating."

"We have some work to do to reassure members of Congress and the American people that we are serious about being responsible in the exercise of these authorities," he said.


And once again why exactly should we believe you? Mr. Gonzales has show little or no respect for the rule of law which seems to be bendable and stretchable at his whim and fancy. Say like retaining federal prosecutors.

This just shows that there needs to some sort of oversight so questions are raised when the government plans to obtain information on people. This does not, as the Bush administration says over and over again, hinder the ability of law enforcement agencies from going after the bad guys. This is to make sure they go after the right guys.

The mantra after 9/11 was that law enforcement didn't connect the dots and get the big picture of what was about to happen. The rationale goes further to say that law enforcement needs expanded powers to pursue terrorists. I agree whole hearted with this. But law enforcement needs to be overseen so that they connect the right dots and in the right order.

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