Glenn Greenwald continues to push the warrantless wiretapping story forward. Is this the America you want to leave for your children?
In essence, the FBI and our nation's telecommunications companies have secretly created a framework whereby the FBI can obtain -- instantaneously and without limits -- any information it asks for. The Patriot Act already substantially expanded the circumstances under which the FBI can obtain such records without the need for subpoenas or any judicial process, and it left in place only the most minimal limitations and protections. But it is those very minimal safeguards which the FBI continuously violated in order to obtain whatever information its agents desired, about any Americans they targeted, with literally no limits of any kind.
In order to obtain telephone records within this FBI-telecom framework, FBI agents have been simply furnishing letters to the telecom companies -- not even NSLs, just plain letters from an agent -- assuring the telecom companies that (a) the records were needed immediately due to "exigent circumstances" and (b) a subpoena for the records had been submitted to the U.S. Attorneys Office and was in the process of being finalized. Upon receiving that letter, the telecoms provided any records the FBI requested -- instantaneously, via computer.At times, they would request records for multiple numbers at once, and sometimes for hundreds of numbers...
But the law does not allow any such process. They simply invented it outside of any legal framework in order to get the information they wanted. The FBI and the telecom companies, on their own, have basically created a lawless framework whereby FBI agents can obtain whatever information they ask for with no safeguards.
Worse, in many of these cases where these letters were provided, they were completely false -- both because there were no "exigent" circumstances of any kind and there were no subpoenas that were submitted or being processed. So the FBI agents who submitted these instruction letters repeatedly made false statements in order to obtain highly intrusive records. This is the crux of the abuse...
Far worse still, one of the very few safeguards remaining after the Patriot Act is that the records sought by the FBI must at least relate to an actual national security investigation. That is not just some bureaucratic or petty record-keeping requirement. That is what ensures an actual nexus between the records the FBI obtains concerning your private activities and a real national security purpose. Without that limitation, the FBI just has the free-floating power to compile dossiers on whomever they want.
Yet in hundreds of cases (at least), the FBI sought these records even though there was no pending investigation to which the records related. That means that there were no limits on the telecommunications records which the FBI sought and obtained.
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