By min | February 18, 2010, 9:01 AM | Music| Link

February 5, 2010

FBI Faked Alerts to Get Phone Records

Having watched many cop shows and movies (which are always accurate reflections of reality), I would be more surprised to find out this sort of thing doesn't happen often - even prior to the Towers getting blown up - for all sorts of reasons besides "terrorism".

The US justice department is preparing a report which concludes that the FBI repeatedly broke the law by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist to obtain more than 2,000 telephone call records over four years from 2002, including those of journalists on US newspapers, according to emails obtained by the Washington Post.

The bureau also issued authorisations for the seizure of records after the fact, in order to justify unwarranted seizures.

The Washington Post said the emails show how counter-terrorism ­officials inside FBI headquarters breached regulations designed to protect civil liberties.

The FBI's general counsel, Valerie Caproni, told the Washington Post that the agency violated privacy laws by inventing non-existent terrorist threats to justify collecting the phone records. "We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said.

I think this is my favorite bit:

The FBI later apologised to editors of both papers.

They prolly said something to the effect of "We're sorry if you were offended" which seems to qualify as an apology nowadays. We're not sorry for what we did. We don't think we did anything wrong. We're just sorry you got upset at us for it (read: we're sorry we got caught).