From Crooks and Liars
Remember when we were told that the scary powers of the Patriot Act
would only be used against terrorists? Good times! Imagine an
open-ended, secret audit of your business finances -- just in case. Just
as we saw RICO abused by the FBI in the 80s and 90s, now they're using
the Patriot Act to sidestep the legal process for reasons that have
nothing to do with terrorism.
Michael Isokoff:
The
FBI has dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of
the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of
U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama, according to recent Justice
Department reports to Congress. The bureau filed 212 requests for such
data to a national security court last year - a 1,000-percent increase
from the number of such requests four years earlier, the reports show.
The FBI's increased use of the Patriot Act's "business records"
provision - and the wide ranging scope of its requests -- is getting new
scrutiny in light of last week's disclosure that that the provision was
used to obtain a top-secret national security order requiring
telecommunications companies to turn over records of millions of
telephone calls.
Taken together, experts say, those
revelations show the government has broadly interpreted the Patriot Act
provision as enabling it to collect data not just on specific
individuals, but on millions of Americans with no suspected terrorist
connections. And it shows that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court accepted that broad interpretation of the law.
"That
they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is
definitely the biggest surprise," said Robert Chesney, a top national
security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. "Most people who
followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We've gone
from producing records for a particular investigation to the production
of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It's incredibly
sweeping."
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