New Documents Will Weigh On PATRIOT Act Debate
PATRIOT Act supporters have repeated the talking point that there have been no abuses of intrusive provisions of the law.
This turns out not to be true.
Govexec.com has a report that a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the government by the Electronic Privacy Information Center has resulted in a court-ordered document dump.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center early last year filed a FOIA request but received few documents until a federal district judge in November ordered the FBI to produce 1,500 pages of documents every 15 days until the requests are fulfilled. EPIC is scheduled to receive the latest batch of documents Wednesday.
The previous batch of documents, delivered shortly before Christmas, show that the FBI's office of general counsel had sent to the Intelligence Oversight Board several complaints about agents' snooping activities. The board is comprised of three members, is housed in the White House and reports to the president.
Some of the complaints relate to how agents tracked their targets. One complaint, for example, showed concern over the tracking of a suspect's telephone calls. The agent continued the tracking even after someone other than the suspect started using the phone, said Marcia Hofmann, director of EPIC's open government project.
Another document shows that an FBI agent received an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that allowed him to access addressing information on a suspect's e-mails, but he ultimately accessed more information in the e-mails than allowed by the court.
I have a feeling that as these documents are released 1500 pages at a time, there will many more lurid accounts of overreaching by the feds.
We can only hope that our brave (sic) politicians have the guts to do the right thing.
posted by Effwit at 12:14 AM
2 Comments:
Oh, but we need to do this to defeat the terrorists if we're going to win the "War on Terror". Don't you know that? Anyone who thinks the Patriot Act is a danger to our rights must be unAmerican. They must want the terrorists to win. They must want another attack.
;-)
Of course, that's very close to the response that we continue to hear from our glorious leaders. Much the same as what Cheney had to say today at The Heritage Foundation. Anything goes in the "War on Terror".
The neo-cons have long wanted to enact police-state provisions to our nation's laws.
I have heard that most (if not all) of the PATRIOT Act had already been committed to paper years before 9-11.
That's how they had this enormous bill ready to go in it's immediate aftermath.
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