Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

FBI Illegally Obtained Personal Phone Records for Years

by Amar Toor on January 21, 2010 at 07:30 AM

E-mails recently obtained by The Washington Post confirm what we've all known for a while now: the FBI stockpiled private phone records for years, and violated civil liberty laws in the process. According to the Post, FBI officials collected over 2,000 U.S. phone call records between 2002 and 2006, all in the name of counter-terrorism. More troubling, though, is the underhanded way in which the Bureau went about obtaining the information. According to internal memos, FBI agents often cited trumped-up terrorist emergencies as justification for accessing the data. Only after the records were collected did officials go back and draft an official approval to substantiate their requests, using a device known as an "exigent circumstances letter," an internal technique authorized back in 2003.

That letter seems to have been law enforcement officials' knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. Bureau officials felt they needed to gather as much information as they could, as expediently as possible. Invoking an exigent circumstances letter, they claimed at the time, was "imperative to the continuing efforts by the FBI to protect our nation against future attacks," even if much of the collected data "may not actually be related to the terrorism activity under investigation." A full Justice Department Inspector General's report is due out later this month, and will likely provide many more details of the covert operations.

Yes, the job of protecting the nation is unimaginably stressful, and extreme events can sometimes lead to extreme measures. But irrespective of where you draw the line between national security and the right to privacy, we think it's pretty obvious that this was a major blunder. Civil liberty laws are there for a very good reason, and fear should never justify altering the bedrock of our legal system. Perhaps more importantly, though, isn't this exactly the kind of broad, sweeping surveillance that has so weighted down our national intelligence database? Isn't this the kind of thing that allowed the Christmas Day bomber to slip through the open crack between two lists of high alert suspects?

Maybe agents were acting in our best interest, but after a certain point, the balance between a comprehensive national intelligence system and an overloaded, disorganized mass of data reaches a slippery inflection point. And when we reach this point, as we found out on Christmas, security officials need to seriously consider streamlining the system, and localizing their efforts. The FBI tells the Post that it's cleaning up its act. We certainly hope it's true. [From: The Washington Post]

Tags: fbi, government, privacy, surveillance, terrorism, top

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular