[Quick Refresher: The Ohm Project is a site providing information about threats to Internet privacy and freedom along with advice and tips about how to fight back against these encroachments. Last week, about 10,000 unique visitors came to the site, mainly through two diaries on the "Recommended" list at dailykos.com, reddit.com and numerous other sites.]

The Ohm Project (ohmproject.org) was knocked off the Net yesterday. The site has been hosted on a German server run by E-Tunnels, a VPN provider and sponsor of The Ohm Project.

Both The Ohm Project and E-Tunnels went dark on Wednesday about midday Central European time. No notice whatsoever was provided to either party prior to shutdown. When an inquiry was made to the service provider, he said that "the German police" had made three complaints beginning about a month ago about unspecified "abuse" originating from one of the IP addresses assigned to E-Tunnels.

Via mateosf, FBI director Robert Mueller and his agency might be in some serious trouble.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a report on the misuse of a National Security Letter by the FBI. Using the Freedom of Information Act, they obtained FBI documents showing that the FBI purposely delayed an investigation in the 2005 London bombings. From the EFF blog:

FBI documents show that, over the span of three days in July 2005, the Charlotte Division of the FBI first obtained educational records pursuant to a grand jury subpoena, and then -- at the direction of FBIHQ -- returned the records and sought them again pursuant to an improper NSL.

The improper NSL was refused by the university, but the FBI finally obtained them pursuant to a second grand jury subpoena. Later in July 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller used the delay in obtaining these particular records as an example of why the FBI needed administrative subpoena power instead of NSLs in testimony.

The misuse of the NSL was not formally reported until February 2007, a short time before Inspector General Glenn Fine’s report on the abuse of NSLs was due before Congress. While the Inspector General's report identified dozens of instances in which National Security Letters may have violated laws and agency regulations and were not reported, this is the first time documents have shown that top FBI executives were aware of a misuse before it was officially reported. It took almost two years before the incident was formally reported.

Ryan Singel at Wired fills in a few gaps:

At issue is the FBI's probe of a former chemistry graduate student at North Carolina State University who was then suspected aiding the deadly attack.  The student has since been cleared of any involvement.

The agent investigating the student in the Charlotte, North Carolina field office obtained a grand jury subpoena demanding some university records on the student. But he was then advised by superiors in Washington DC to return the papers and draft an NSL demanding the documents instead.

Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI counterterrorism investigators can self-issue such letters to get phone records, portions of credit reports and bank records, simply by certifying that the records are relevant to an investigation. Unlike subpoenas, NSLs do not require probable cause, and at the time obliged the recipient to not discuss the demand with anyone, ever. In contrast, gag orders attached to grand jury subpoenas have expiration dates.

FBI agents have relied heavily on the power, issuing more than 100,000 NSLs in 2004 and 2005 combined. The first audit of the FBI's use of the power found the agents became sloppy in their use of the power and one HQ office went rogue and issued hundreds of fake emergency requests for phone records.

The FBI knew that the university records were not obtainable via an NSL, and the university properly rejected that request--a request that had already fulfilled once, legally in response to a grand jury subpoena. And which was fulfilled, again, when the FBI field office came back with the proper subpoena after the whole exercise in NSL futility.

An exercise that has all the appearances of having been set up for Robert Mueller to appear two weeks later before a Senate committee.

Mueller, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, portrayed the university as intransigent and said the incident showed the FBI needed the power to force the turnover of all sorts of records without having to involve the court system.

"Now in my mind, we should not, in that circumstance have to show somebody that this was an emergency," Mueller testified on July 27, 2005. "We should've been able to have a document, an administrative subpoena that we took to the university and got those records immediately."

Some of the declassified documents suggest that Mueller was himself misled by underlings, and wasn't told that the records had already been turned over in response to a subpoena.

It would appear officials in the FBI, at very high levels that may or may not have included Mueller, conspired to lie to Congress. That would be a felony. It also raises the question of whether there are other violations of NSLs that have never been reported and that the FBI might still be trying to keep under wraps.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has an already scheduled hearing about NSLs. It's been postponed from tomorrow to the following Wednesday, April 23, and hopefully the witness list will be expanded to include Mueller. He's got some explaining to do.

By Mandy Simon, ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Today’s a big week for National Security Letters, the secret government subpoenas issued to gain access to personal or business records without court approval. There’s a hearing tomorrow in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and another hearing Wednesday in front of the full Senate Judiciary Committee. Tomorrow’s hearing features not only the ACLU but the DOJ Inspector General himself, Mr. Glenn Fine, and FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni. The government panelists will go first but we’ll be there, ever watchful, until it’s our turn to step up to the mic.

"Deep-packet" snooping  by American and European ISPs may present a more serious threat to democracy and freedom of expression than most realize.  A Washington Post  story over the weekend detailed how Americans are increasingly subjected to intense spying by the ISPs who are using their ability to "sniff" customers' Internet activity to collect data for profit.

Warrantless wiretapping, retroactive immunity, Operation Total Information Awareness, passport file breaches, a toothless Oversight Operations Board stacked with cronies. Each a head on the monster that is the Bush administration's approach to intelligence, one in which political expediency trumps the Constitution every time. Trying to get a grasp on the magnitude of what we already know about the administration's efforts to break down the wall between foreign and domestic spying and to end all oversight of those activities either by Congress or the Judiciary is an enormous task.

I spoke with Sen. Ron Wyden, member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, last week about what we know so far, where we might be going, and how to to rein in an executive that has gone out of control.

Q: We had so many revelations of overstepping by this administration on intelligence issues over just the past few months, where are we at now in Congress?

Wyden: The way I characterize it is that I think that this administration basically is allowing a culture that says violating the privacy rights of law-abiding people isn’t that big a deal. That’s what it is. Literally, if you look at this administration running through all of these issues—oversight board, Operation Total Information Awareness—all of it; they’ve basically allowed a culture to develop that says trashing people’s privacy rights isn’t that big a deal. And when they’re caught they say, oh my goodness, well we’d better get it corrected, but if they cared more about the rights of law-abiding people, we wouldn’t have one example after another. [With the passport snooping revelations] . . . you can literally look and say once again this administration is asleep on the privacy issue.

Q: Will all these revelations on intelligence give the Senate pause on telecom immunity?

Wyden: We ought to start by saying that the real issue here is why won’t the Bush administration take yes for an answer on FISA? They came to us and said we need to modernize the law. The law hadn’t kept up with the times since the 1970s and people like myself and Senator Feingold and others said ok, that’s a valid point. We’re going to work with you to modernize the law. And then there were all the issues, you know there will be a modest number of people who’d be swept up in the various programs and what would be done to protect them? And it was clear that we had a lot of concerns on that, but they talked about minimization procedures, you know procedures to try to hold down the number of cases and a lot of swallowed hard and said, ok, we’re willing to work with that, too. But when they did two other things, one, went after total retroactive immunity, and two, basically tried to sweep judicial oversight by the boards, that’s when we said that’s too much. Now you won’t take yes for an answer, and we said we’re not going to do it. What the House of Representatives is trying to do is a more judicious approach that’s more sensitive to privacy rights and so it’s fine. Without getting into details, we’re going to give phone companies the chance to make their case but we’re not going to be throwing retroactive immunity out there.

Q Will the House's solution on allowing the cases to go forward fly with the Senate?

Wyden: There are a number of Senators who are going to look at this and I hope that, again, as people look at case after case after case where the administration has not been sensitive to privacy rights that this will strengthen our hand. What the House is trying to show is, all right, we’re going to be sensitive to the concerns of the phone companies, but we’re not going to say that after five years of the administration saying a program is legal, and then there are all these lawsuits filed that we’re going to just take care of it with retroactive immunity. . . . Let’s stick with what Mike McConnell said in open session. . . . Mike McConnell said, before all the politics began, Mike McConnell said that intelligence gathering wouldn’t be jeopardized by the lapse in the law. . . . About every week the president has a news conference and says that western civilization is going to end without retroactive immunity despite the fact that Mike McConnell came to the committee, before the politics started, [and said intelligence gathering wouldn't be jeopardized.] They continue to have others do their work for them. A variety of interest groups and sympathetic people in the media are constantly clobbering the House bill, but what’s interesting is that even those who are critical of the House bill on the right, they can’t say that this is unfair treatment of the phone companies. . . .

Q: You've spent the recess back in Oregon. What have people in town meetings been saying?

Wyden: Americans understand that the founding fathers set up our unique and wonderful system as a kind of Constitutional teeter-totter. On one side you would have collective security, and on the other side you would have individual liberty. The teeter-totter would be right there in balance. . . . As you listen to people, and I just had town meetings all over eastern Oregon where people are asking about privacy issues, too . . . people think that under this administration the Constitutional teeter-totter is imbalanced, it’s out of whack. That kind of balancing act that allowed us to have both collective security and individual liberties because of this administration is threatening both.

Q: You are responsible for killing Operation Total Information Awareness when they tried to get it passed as a full-fledged program. Now we know it different parts have been implemented despite the Congressional ban by the Pentagon anyway. Any word yet on what Congress might do about that?

Wyden: The article came out right before the break, so I can’t tell you. . . . I think both in the Congress and in the country that there’s a real hunger to get back to this issue. I asked about Operation Total Information Awareness in public, about whether, you know, several years afterwards . . . about whether they were trying to bring it back, and they said we're not going to answer you in public session. Then we went into closed session and I asked it again, and I think that the American people have a right to that answer in public and there ought to be a public debate about whether there's an effort to bring this back. I obviously can't answer what was said in classified session, but I think the answer when I posed to them in public, I think there needs to be a debate about that....

All of it, coming as a backdrop to FISA coming back, passports, national security letters . . . . The reality is, this is a tool to get lots of people's personal records and they're increasing. . . . There are a lot of pieces to the puzzle but I come away saying that if anything, as people look at all the technology and they look at how fast society moves, they're asking more and more are my rights going to get trampled in the process. That protecting privacy and having the security and safety of your community are not mutually exclusive. That's what the Bush administration wants to do more than anything else, they want to tell people it's one or the other—you can have your security or you can have your liberty.

Wyden's constituents aren't either more tuned in nor more intelligent than the rest of America. The argument that the public doesn't care about privacy rights or is willing to cede them for more security is easily dispatched once the public is actually asked what they think, something that happens all too rarely. When they are asked, voters soundly reject the argument that they have to trade their liberty for security Most recently, in the only large scale polling [pdf] done on FISA and warrantless wiretapping, The Mellman Group found:

Voters’ views on this issue are quite robust, impervious to even the strongest arguments coming out of the White House.  Voters were given the argument against warrantless wiretaps and heard a strong statement from supporters, incorporating language used by the President and Vice President. The message argued that while we are in a war on terror against ruthless enemies who have vowed our destruction, the President’s hands should not be tied with red tape that prevents him from keeping us safe and staying a step ahead of terrorists.  Even in the face of these powerful arguments, 62% say the government should have to get a warrant from a court before wiretapping Americans’ international conversations, while just about half as many (32%) support the President’s position. Thus, when presented with arguments on both sides, opposition to warrantless wiretapping increases by a net of 4 points.

So it's time for the public to flex its muscle on this issue. The first step is to demand what Sen. Wyden is calling for--public hearings about what the government is up to in implementing the various components of Operation Total Information Awareness in outright defiance of a Congressional ban. The intelligence committees should immediate convene hearings and demand public answers. That means you, Jello Jay Rockefeller need to do your job. Every Democrat on that committee (Feinstein, Wyden, Bayh, Mikulski, Bill Nelson, Feingold, and Whitehouse) should be demanding hearings as well.

Second, demand that Congress not give one inch on any intelligence issue--particularly retroactive amnesty--to this administration which has time and time again shown not just a callous disregard for the privacy rights of Americans, but an outright hostility to them and to the Constitution in which they are enshrined. If they're Constitutional duty isn't enough to compel them to do the right thing, they might consider this reminder from Julian Sanchez:

Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can -- and repeatedly have -- abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.... Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler's phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures. (As New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer can attest, a single wiretap is all it takes to torpedo a political career.)...

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won't turn its "national security" surveillance powers to political ends -- well, it would be a first.

Update: In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for Wyden when he served in the House of Representatives.

I was hoping that smintheus's front page post (The FBI: Retroactive blanket immunity in action) would have touched on this aspect of the story, but surprisingly there has been no discussion of the implications of the FBI General Counsel's disagreement with the FISA court about the First Amendment.  The court said that someone can not be investigated merely because they are associates with an existing subject of an investigation, because that would violate the First Amendment right to freedom of association.  The FBI illegally circumvented the court's decision, and in defending that decision, the FBI admitted that violating the right to freedom of association is a common practice. The following is from the AP story:

The Justice Department's Inspector General published a report (PDF) today on the FBI's continued abuse of National Security Letters. However the IG postponed reporting on the abuse of "blanket" NSLs. We learned about the existence of these only today from the NY Times. They're an example of how the Bush "administration" actually employs retroactive immunity to shield its own lawbreaking.

In 2006 the FBI, having issued truckloads of warrantless NSLs illegally, decided it needed a way to make all of them legal retroactively. So it did what any agency would do under this "administration" - it waved the magic wand handed over to it by Congress, and presto! The FBI simply issued "blanket" NSLs to each of the telecoms in question to justify after the fact all the records it had previously scooped up.

Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of "blanket" records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice...

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.

So there was no effective oversight of the use of warrantless NSLs. Nor were there any objections to the FBI granting itself blanket retroactive immunity for breaking even the nominal restrictions that Congress imposed on NSLs in the Patriot Act. In fact, the NYT quotes an FBI official saying that these blanket grants were "pure of heart" even if, you know, illegal.

Notice that this story confirms again what Kagro X has been saying: Every day of delay during the FISA debate brings further revelations about how the Bush "administration" abuses any surveillance power it's granted.

On March 5, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Inspector General's investigation into NSL abuse during 2006. He led the Senate to believe that the IG would find nothing more than a continuation of the abuses that already had been exposed for the years 2003 to 2005.

The new audit, which examines use of national security letters issued in 2006, "will identify issues similar to those in the report issued last March," Mueller told senators. The privacy abuse "predates the reforms we now have in place," he said.

"We are committed to ensuring that we not only get this right, but maintain the vital trust of the American people," Mueller said. He offered no additional details about the upcoming audit...

Several Justice Department and FBI officials familiar with the upcoming 2006 findings have said privately the new audit will show national security letters were used incorrectly at a similar rate as during the previous three years.

Funny, we heard nothing at all back then about "blanket" NSLs, either from Mueller or from those anonymous FBI officials who were being so helpful to reporters. Yet today, this scandal just emerges out of the blue...and only because it was revealed by the lawyer for an FBI whistleblower, Bassem Youssef. How many more of the Bush "administration's" secret abuses of surveillance powers remain to be exposed?

The Associated Press is reporting today that the FBI continued to illegal spy on Americans in 2006.  The illegal spying, benignly referred to as a violation of civil rights, is conducted through the abuse of national security letters.

The national security letters (NSL) compel (courtesy of The Center for Democracy and Technology) disclosure of information held by "banks, credit companies, telephone carriers, and internet service providers, among others."  In 2000, the FBI issued 8,500 NLS requests.  This number increased to approximately 47,000 requests by 2005, and totaled over 140,000 requests between 2003 and 2005. Today, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged that abuse of the NSL authority continued unabated in 2006, but that the reforms initiated in 2007 would prevent "future lapses."

In Washington Tuesday, members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee savaged Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callahan for the company's involvement in the 2005 jailing of a Chinese dissident.  But if their bipartisan criticism of Yahoo's behavior - cooperating with a Chinese government "subpoena-like document" to supply information about journalists accused of the "illegal provision of state secrets" - sounds disingenuous, it should.  After all, those are trademark tactics of the Bush administration and its Republican amen corner in the aftermath of 9/11.

The ACLU through the use of FOIAs has uncovered more abuses of the system by the DOD and it's illegal uses of NSLs. In this new Press Release are some rather startling revelations.

NEW YORK - New documents uncovered as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit reveal that the Department of Defense secretly issued hundreds of national security letters (NSLs) to obtain private and sensitive records of people within the United States without court approval. A comprehensive analysis of 455 NSLs issued after 9/11 shows that the Defense Department seems to have collaborated with the FBI to circumvent the law, may have overstepped its legal authority to obtain financial and credit records, provided misleading information to Congress, and silenced NSL recipients from speaking out about the records requests, according to the ACLU.
http://www.aclu.org/...

This just in:

From the New York Times:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

Essentially, we are now being told that so-called "communities of interest," of a terror suspect's network of people with whom contact is made, are also the subjects of telecommunications analysis by the FBI, though the project has allegedly been halted while the Bureau is currently under scrutiny for abuses of process as it relates to the national security letters.

Don't be so sure.

One of the most valuable but least mourned traditions destroyed by the George W. Bush administration is the quaint notion that the government won't do stuff that's against the law. It used to be the case that Congress could outlaw something, and by virtue of it being outlawed, it could safely be assumed that -- for the most part, at least -- government and political actors wouldn't do that thing. Because it was against the law. And this country was governed by the rule of law. The stain of criminality would be too much for publicly elected officials to withstand.

Well, here's a sampling from just this week of things that we used to assume would never happen -- least of all to what used to be our most cherished civil liberties -- but happened anyway, and for which there's really no particular punishment, and for which the current political climate promises no particular remedy:

• The ADVISE system, announced as scrapped this week by the Department of Homeland Security. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was:

  one of the broadest of 12 data-mining projects in the agency... able to ingest 1 billion pieces per hour of structured information, such as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces per hour from unstructured text, such as government intelligence reports.

  Why was it scrapped?

  Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism."

  Oh, really? Then do you think this was a good way to test the system?

  Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements.

  Of course not! Even Joementum agrees:

  Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said DHS "must follow federal privacy laws — in this case the E-Government Act which requires privacy impact assessments before personal information can be used — in order to maintain public support for these new technologies."

  Must follow federal privacy laws. Unless it doesn't. In which case Senator Lieberman will do... what, exactly?

  Right.

• National Security Letters, struck down as unconstitutional in federal court yesterday. The same National Security Letters that you may recall were found back in March to have been wildly abused by the FBI.

Unchecked, rampant abuse. Unconstitutional abuse of power. And even the nation's top law enforcement official lying to Congress about it.

The inspector general's report prompted an uproar in Congress because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had testified that there had not been a reported instance of Patriot Act powers being abused. Later, it turned out Gonzales had been aware of the problems with the National Security Letters.

The penalty? A tidy retirement package for Abu Gonzales, secured while Congress twiddled its thumbs and maybe, sorta, kinda considered forcing him out instead of holding the door for him.

• The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, which both require that the White House preserve records of its official e-mail traffic. You remember, right? The e-mails that the Congress has been seeking with its "subpoena power," but which the "administration" says it lost? Five million times over? Turns out they just, you know, didn't feel like complying with that law, either. And what's the remedy? The National Security Archive is suing the White House.

  In the meantime, Henry Waxman is investigating, but guess what? The White House says it's not it's fault, because the archiving required by law was contracted out. To whom? They won't tell!

  The law requires that these things be preserved. But what's the penalty for just not doing it? Nobody knows. In Iran-Contra, we found out that there were no particular penalties described in the Presidential Records Act. And nobody's changed that. It's just... against the law.

And that's just a sampling of this week's action. I didn't even get to the "administration's" continued intransigence over its application of various "national security" and "state secrets" pleadings, which took a hit in court this week too, in connection with the ACLU's FOIA suit over the other domestic spying programs.

All of this must, unfortunately, also be considered in the context of Congressional maneuvering on Iraq as well. Why? Because next week Congress is set to hear testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker which many observers believe will be misleading at best, and full of outright lies at worst. And this is Congressionally mandated testimony. A report required by law in the last Iraq supplemental. To be delivered, in fact, under the signature of the president. Full of benchmarks and requirements, but no benchmarks or requirements that the reports and testimony be truthful or empirically sound. Because we still take that stuff for granted, even though this "administration" has made a mockery of that assumption too many times to count, and certainly too many times for the Congress to have forgotten. And yet, there it is.

And there's more coming, too. With another $200 billion supplemental on the table, Congress will shortly consider still more guidelines, reporting requirements, and anything-but-timetables.

Given the record, dare we even hope that this time, they'll be viewed as obligations and not merely annoyances that can safely be disposed of with yet another cloud of obfuscation, stonewalling, and outright bullshit?

Patrick Leahy is a former prosecutor, and it shows.  Take a gander at the letter he sent to Gonzales in advance of AGAG's testimony next week.

My fave is, of course, this:

When you last testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 19, 2007, you often responded to questions from Senators on both sides of the aisle that you could "not recall..." I would like to avoid a repeat of that performance.

Let's take a closer look, though, at Leahy's performance.

So you're Acting Attorney General James Comey.  You have the authority to sign, or refuse to sign, a reauthorization of a program for non-domestic surveillance.  You're told (by the President, no less) that an end-run around that authorization is being attempted by the President's own Counsel -- a hospital visit to your sedated boss, where he'll be asked to sign the paper you're now responsible for.  

You rush over to prevent it.  Who do you call for support?

That's right.  The guy in charge of a federal agency responsible for a slew of violations of that very authorization: the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller.

How can we trust a government which has dedicated itself to panoptical electronic surveillance when the FBI doesn't even have a useful computer system to sustain it?  There have been plenty of articles about how their database couldn't be searched with more than one term, and plenty more about how the incredibly expensive, incredibly delayed replacement system would probably have to be scrapped, but this takes the cake:

CNet's Declan McCullagh reports that yesterday during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee FBI Director Robert Mueller blamed computer snafus for deceiving Congress about how often national security letters are used.

And you thought you didn't want to know how laws and sausages were made.

FBI Director Robert Mueller attempted to defend his agency's misuse of the Patriot Act's provision for National Security Letters. Mueller said the law wasn't the cause of the errors, but how the FBI implemented the use of the National Security Letters was.

I don't get it.

How can Mueller disconnect the law that allows for using National Security Letters from their misuse?

Doesn't the misuse in itself mean the law was poorly crafted?

Is Mueller really saying the FBI doesn't need any guidance in this matter?

....because, if Mueller is really advocating this position, then i have to say, he doesn't have much cred with me.

I turned on C-Span to discover Mueller giving his version of how the FBI is doing everything right now, etc., etc.

Leahy has torn into him re: NSLs and the no-subpoena situation, and the fact that FBI has gone for FISA warrants with nothing but crap in their representations to the FISA court to get the warrants.

Somebody here must be interested in this !

Here come Specter to ask if FBI has enough funding to protect the country from terrorists. Of course Mueller, breathing "thank you !" under his breath, says they don't.

Somebody want to carry on with this ?

The live feed is on C-Span 3 http://c-span.org/...

Specter now asking

Any of you guys on a watch list?  Would Kos be able to tell you, or just disclose away.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information.

My National Security Letter