Trust us, they said. We'll never abuse the provisions of the Patriot Act, they said. We only want what is best for you, they said. We only want to protect the nation from terror, they said. Trust us.
The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that according to the FBI's own estimate, as many as 600 of these violations could be "cases of serious misconduct" involving the improper use of "national security letters" to compel telephone companies, banks and credit institutions to produce records.
Fine's estimate of the incidence of serious abuses was extrapolated from his investigators' scrutiny of 293 national security letters, out of 44,000 letters -- containing 143,074 data requests -- that the FBI has reported issuing during the three-year period he reviewed. Of those letters studied, he found "about seven where there were illegal uses" to obtain information the FBI was not entitled to have. Caproni questioned the validity of the extrapolation but acknowledged that 1 percent of the letters examined by Fine were tainted by "unquestionably serious violations."
Fine said, however, that he found no evidence that FBI agents "intended to go out and obtain information that they knew they could not obtain and said, 'We're going to do it anyway.' I think what they did was complete carelessness" prompted partly by a desire to take "shortcuts."
Fine's extrapolated tally of 3,000 likely illegal or improper letters did not include three other categories of wrongdoing disclosed in his report: One was a headquarters unit's use of 739 "exigent circumstances" letters to obtain telephone records from AT&T, Verizon and MCI on an emergency basis using false statements or improper documentation. The second was an improper use of 300 national security letters to obtain information for a single classified project. And the third was the FBI's use of improper letters to obtain the financial records of 244 people from banks.
The entire premise of our nation is that you cannot trust anyone with unchecked or absolute power. Madison:
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other gthat the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
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