If I am reading this right, it's kind of tragically comic. As a way to cover its derriere for obtaining phone records, emails, etc. from telecom companies and banks, etc. using claimed energency circumstances that turned out not to exist, the FBI then went and issued retroactive "blanket" requests to those carriers to justify the past exigent national security letters, the Inspector General has found:

... By 2006, F.B.I. officials began learning that the bureau had issued thousands of “exigent” or emergency records demands to phone providers in situations where no life-threatening emergency existed, according to the account of Mr. Youssef, who worked with the phone companies in collecting records in terrorism investigations. In these situations, the F.B.I. had promised the private companies that the emergency records demands would be followed up with formal subpoenas or properly processed letters, but often, the follow-up material never came.

This created a backlog of records that the F.B.I. had obtained without going through proper procedures. In response, the letter said, the F.B.I. devised a plan: rather than issuing national security letters retroactively for each individual investigation, it would issue the blanket letters to cover all the records obtained from a particular phone company.

“When Mr. Youssef was first informed of this concept, he was very uncomfortable with it,” his lawyer, Mr. Kohn, said in his letter to Senator Grassley. But the plan was ultimately approved in 2006 by three senior officials at highest levels of the F.B.I., and in the process, Mr. Kohn maintains, the solution may have worsened the problem.

“They made a mistake in cleaning up a mistake,” Mr. Kohn said, “because they didn’t know the law.”

An F.B.I. official who asked for anonymity because the inspector general is still examining the blanket warrant issue said the practice was “an attempt to fix a problem.”

“This was ham-handed but pure of heart,” the official said. “This was nothing evil, but it was not the right way to do it.”

The only silver lining if there is one is that we can bet all those warrantless wiretaps and phone and bank records are detecting lots of interesting behavior of our elected officials who are perhaps not doing enough to protect the public from government trampling over civil liberties. They seem to be keeping the FBI's public corruption division busy anyhow.

Posted by Laura at March 13, 2008 08:31 AM