WASHINGTON – The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally, used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.
And for three years the FBI underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over customer data, the audit found.
The audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine found that FBI agents sometimes demanded personal data on individuals without proper authorization. The 126-page audit also found the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in nonemergency circumstances.
The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.
Still, “we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,” the audit concludes.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who oversees the FBI, described the problems cited in the report as unacceptable and left open the possibility of criminal charges.
“Once we get that information, we’ll be in a better position to assess what kinds of steps should be taken,” Gonzales said.
The audit released Friday found that the number of national security letters issued by the FBI skyrocketed in the years after the Patriot Act became law.
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 letters. By 2003, however, that number jumped to 39,000. It rose again the next year, to about 56,000 letters in 2004, and dropped to approximately 47,000 in 2005.
Over the entire three-year period, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 national security letters requesting customer data from businesses, the audit found. But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI’s database, the audit found.
Fine’s annual review is required by Congress, over the objections of the Bush administration.
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