President Bush on Saturday pledged an end to FBI lapses that led to illegal prying into people's lives.
"Those problems will be addressed as quickly as possible," Bush said during a news conference in Uruguay, the second stop on his Latin America trip.
A new audit by the Justice Department's internal watchdog found that the FBI improperly used a tool called national security letters. The letters are administrative subpoenas that don't require judicial approval.
Agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records. Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame in most cases, the audit found.
"My question is, `What are you going to do solve the problem and how fast can you get it solved?'" said Bush, who was briefed on the report last week.
Bush said he was pleased by the response of FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has taken responsibility and promised to fix the problems.
Bush expressed confidence in Mueller and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The president said that while the report by the Justice Department's inspector general "justly made issue of FBI shortfalls, (it) also made clear that these letters were important to the security of the United States."
Of course the president is upset, it is not the job of the FBI to illegally pry into people's lives, that is the job of the NSA.
Here is some additional information on this from OpEdNews.com:
Seems like more of the same crap, we need to take away your constitutionally guarnateed rights and liberties in order to protect you in our fight against terror. How many more days until a new administration?...the Inspector General found the FBI misused Patriot Act powers to obtain information about US citizens and residents through “National Security Letters” or NSLs.
NSL’S are administrative subpoenas that allow the FBI to obtain content of transactions, like bank records, phone records or Internet providers.
They are controversial for a number of reasons, more notably, unlike a warrant or subpoena, no approval is necessary from a judge. In fact, an NSL only needs approval from the agent in charge at a local FBI office. Recipients of the letters are instructed to ‘keep quiet’ or risk the wrath of the law....
Worries of abuse by FBI agents sans judicial oversight had been one of the biggest fears expressed by civil libertarians opposing the patriot act. Warnings of warrant-less wiretapping, data mining and the misuse of electronic surveillance of citizens across the country ripped at the country’s soul as fears of terrorism competed with fears of big brother.
In prepared remarks to the International Association of Privacy Professionals Privacy Summit posted on the DOJ website, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales noted that Inspector General Fine had acknowledged that NSL’s are a valuable tool in the fight against terror.
But he also acknowledged the FBI did not have “sufficient controls” and that “insufficient guidance and training” was partly to blame, as well as “some confusion in the field about the rules” regarding the misuses spelled out in the report.
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