Judge orders domestic surveillance docs public [View All]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/16/judge-orders-domestic-surveillance-docs-public/

Judge orders domestic surveillance docs public.

“Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency’s use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.”
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/06/judge_orders_fb.html

The April request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the FBI to turn over documents related to its misuse of National Security Letters, self-issued subpoenas that don’t need a judge’s approval and which can get financial, phone and internet records. Recipients of the letters are forbidden by law from ever telling anyone other than their lawyer that they received the request. Though initially warned to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans. Information obtained from the requests, which need only be certified by the agency to be “relevant” to an investigation, are dumped into a data-mining warehouse for perpetuity.