FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data.
By John Solomon
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the
law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about
domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent
years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in
March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security
investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic
surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials
said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much
smaller sampling.
The vast majority of the new violations were instances in which
telephone companies and Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail
records the agents did not request and were not authorized to collect.
The agents retained the information anyway in their files, which mostly
concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.
But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents'
requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have,
according to the audit results provided to The Washington Post. Only two
such examples were identified earlier in the smaller sample.
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