Back in November of 2005, Barton Gellman described the use of ‘National Security Letters’ by the FBI.
Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.
Gellman had all the pieces for the story that the Inspector General of the Justice Deparment broke yesterday. He noted that the letters are issued with no judicial or congressional oversight, that they maintain incomplete records, that records are no longer being destroyed, that improper information is being gathered and shared.
Folks, we’ve been here before. One thing the Church Committee dug up was a very interesting memo from former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s intelligence operations, William C. Sullivan, to the FBI’s Assistant Director, C.D. DeLoach (actually the memo was written by ‘Section Chief F. J. Baumgardner and approved on Sullivan’s behalf by his principal deputy, J. A. Sizoo.’). I supply a copy below.
This illegality has been repeated in the post-9/11 world. Once again the Special Agent in Charge of a field office has been empowered to do black-bag jobs. This time the illegal entry is into your banking or other electronic records. Robert Mueller and Alberto Gonzales should both be fired. They should both be prosecuted. There is no excuse for going outside the law. For several years the FBI (just like the NSA) has been going around the courts and Congress because “it would be impossible to obtain legal sanction for it.”
