14 DAY TRIAL // The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading civil rights watchdog groups, has released a report warning of serious intelligence violations made by the FBI from 2001 to 2008.
EFF's report is based on the careful analysis of thousands of pages of FBI documents obtained from the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The Intelligence Oversight Board is a civilian board which reports to the President and is tasked with monitoring if intelligence laws are respected by federal agencies.
The EFF found that it took on average 2.5 years for the FBI to report a violation to the Intelligence Oversight Board.
The violations included lying in court declarations, obtaining grand jury subpoenas with improper evidence or accessing password-protected files without a warrant.
By extrapolating from the numbers it has, the foundation estimates that the FBI might have committed as many as 40,000 intelligence violations during the last nine years.
According to the IOB documents, over one-third of FBI violations involved breaking internal oversight and intelligence investigation rules.
Another third consisted of abuse, misuse or careless use of the Bureau's authority, while a fifth involved serious violations of the Consitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Act and other criminal investigation laws.
The EFF will distribute copies of its report to members of the Congress. "From 2001 to 2008, the FBI frequently and flagrantly violated laws intended to check abusive intelligence investigations of American citizens," the Foundation says.
"Instead of simply rubber-stamping the intelligence community’s continuing abuse of Americans’ civil liberties, Congress should seize this opportunity to investigate the practices of the FBI and other intelligence agencies, and to demand greater accountability, disclosure, and reporting from these agencies," it concludes.
The EFF report can be downloaded from here in PDF format.