Hmmm, what's that called again?

Hope you're feeling better.

The constitutional crisis continues.

.."The number of abuses {at least the ones uncovered to date) is relatively small compared to the (and it won't be phrased in this manner) insanely huge number of NSL's issued.

BTW, did I get here late, or did Glenn just post without any typos?

If that's their counter-argument they're in serious trouble; from what the Post reported there's been violations at a rate of about 10%, meaning thousands of such incidents have occurred.

if the administration has nothing to hide, why are they afraid of telling Congress and the public about what they are doing? The saddest parts of this: the next president will continue to do the same, or, if Congress removes the power entirely, the FBI, which has become dependent upon overextended power, will become ineffective for some time while they relearn and reaccustom themselves to basic (and constitutional) investigative techniques.

Yet another article to add to the pile...

What the hell happened right after the Patriot Act was signed in to law? A sayonce for J. Edgar Hoover?

...about that counter-argument. I hadn't read the Post article. The little blurb in the Dallas Morning News (retch!) mentioned only a "limited number" of apparent violations, as I recall.

Can say whatever they want about Michael Moore......But they gotta admit, that scene in the movie where he was riding around D.C. in a truck with a megaphone mounted on it, trying to read the Patriot Act to Senators and Congressmen is no laughing matter in hindsight.

The Church Committee and COINTELPRO

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm

talk of impeachment is shrill and divisive!

Keep saying it, Glenn, often and loud:

The Bush administration has created vast and permanent data bases to collect and store evidence revealing the private activities of millions of American citizens. When the FBI obtains information essentially in secret -- with no judicial oversight -- that information is stored in those data bases. This is all being done by the executive branch with no safeguards and no oversight, and the little oversight that Congress has required has been defiantly and publicly brushed aside by the President, who sees legal requirements as nothing more than suggestions or options which he will recognize only if he chooses to. That is the constitutional crisis that we have endured under virtually the entire Bush presidency -- the crisis which, for the most part, our mainstream political and media elite have collectively decided not to acknowledge.

There is no way the FBI can handle such a big job all by itself. Just look at its inability to computerize and integrate. It must be relying on outside help to collect, analyze, and store all the data.

And who would that outside help be? Contractors, preferably with connections to the criminal conspiracy led by figureheads Cheney and Bush.

It's bad enough that the FBI is misbehaving. I guarantee that the contractors are finding themselves unable to resist the temptation to copy, share, store, and use the data we are paying them to steal from us.

I’ve been fighting a nasty bug all week myself, so my apologies if this is a dumb question, but why is this story coming out now?

We’ve learned from the other prominent scandal in the Justice Dept. (the firings of attorneys, and prosecution of Democrats before elections) that this department under Gonzales has become completely politicized.

Yet, this new report has been issued by the Justice Department’s own inspector general. Why couldn’t Gonzalez quash this report? Was this report in response to oversight by Congress, as a result of some subpoena?

In short, I’m thrilled to see some these abuses see the light of day, but I’m unclear why a totally partisan Justice Dept. would issue a self-damaging report. What am I missing?

"BTW, did I get here late, or did Glenn just post without any typos?"

When you can blog every day with perfect character sets please post the url so everyone can see. Until then please shut the fuck up, if you're so anal for professionalism go read the New York Times, they're perfect spellers and traitors to their country and profession.

And I surely don't know the answer. Maybe a clue or something here:

http://www.ignet.gov/

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/

Well, 22 violations in 293 samples (from 77 cases) is bad.

Other salient points:

Entities complying with the letters provided more detail than was needed or permissable, including full personal details, credit reports, and the like.

The FBI said they had 26 other errors that they had found in other cases. So out of a sample of 293, the audit showed a 7.5% error rate, but then the FBI found only 26 out of the other 19,000 (in 2005), for a .14% rate. That is a slight statistical discrepancy.

1 of 5 requests were not reported (then actually 23,750 letters?, and a .11% FBI found error rate).

If this is supposed to protect us against the terrorists, why do I not feel very secure. 19000 reported letters, and maybe a handful of reported terrorism cases. If the false negative rate is as high as this false positive rate, they are missing a lot of needles in this haystack, and the numbers and errors indicate very sloppy work, here. Lets get back to investigating, instead of letter writing, folks.

Headonfire, you make an excellent point. I remember that months ago a number of us tried to point out to the trolls here -- to no avail, of course -- that no matter how benign the intentions of the administration might or might not be, that this sort of thing was inevitable.

It still amazes me how many people there are who won't give out their E-mail addresses voluntarily, or buy things on line, because they're afraid that the Intertubes boogeyman will get them, and yet this goes by them with nary a ripple. I hate to call our fellow citizens dumb, but I can't see how anyone, no matter how ignorant of computer technology they are generally, could fail to see the implications of this.