NSA wiretaps, the FBI, and Attorney-gate
Attention, readers: Do not attempt to adjust your tin foil hats while reading this post.
I certainly yawned over the NSA wiretapping brouhaha. “Oh, come on, they wouldn’t do that to us, ” I said.
Many of us were told to pipe down when we complained that the Justice Department and the NSA had been involved in spying on Americans with no oversight. But now that we know that Barbara Comstock, Monica Goodling and Tim Griffin, Karl Rove’s personal smear artists, were promoted to the highest reaches of the federal police agencies with access to records on their political opponents and every other American, then it’s clear that we weren’t suspicious enough. At this point, I think we have to assume that with these people in charge and having the use of all the new powers of the Patriot Act, there have been no limits at all on the partisan, political use of the government’s investigative powers.
We also might recall that FBI Director Mueller recently admitted that the FBI had mis-used powers granted to it under the Patriot Act, accidentally! –
FBI Director Robert Mueller took responsibility at a Senate hearing yesterday for poor oversight that led to agency abuses of investigative tools authorized in the Patriot Act. He sought to convince lawmakers that his agency should retain the authority to gather telephone, e-mail, travel and financial records without a judge’s approval despite recent reports of problems.
“The statute did not cause the errors. The FBI’s implementation did,” Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee. The dispute is over how the agency issued National Security Letters. These letters demand information from telephone and Internet access companies, universities, public interest organizations, libraries and financial and credit companies. They are issued by senior executives within the organization.
Granting extraordinary investigative powers to a government which has shown itself to be both incompetent and hyper-partisan is a bad idea.
Conservatives — we’re supposed to be in favor of small government, right? For a lot of good reasons, not just economic policy.
Warrantless Wiretaps - GOP Campaign Issue
Will Goodling sing?
Sympathy for the Devils
Attorney-gate Update - Immunity for Goodling?
Throwing McNulty Under the Bus