It seems that the FBI “repeatedly provided inaccurate information to win secret court approval of surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases.”
The errors were pervasive enough that the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, wrote the Justice Department in December 2005 to complain. She raised the possibility of requiring counterterrorism agents to swear in her courtroom that the information they were providing was accurate, a procedure that could have slowed such investigations drastically.
A internal FBI review in early 2006 of some of the more than 2,000 surveillance warrants the bureau obtains each year confirmed that dozens of inaccuracies had been provided to the court. The errors ranged from innocuous lapses, such as the wrong description of family relationships, to more serious problems, such as citing information from informants who were no longer active, officials said.
The FBI contends that none of the mistakes were serious enough to reverse judges’ findings that there was probable cause to issue a surveillance warrant. But officials said the errors were significant enough to prompt reforms bureau-wide.
“It is clear to everybody this is a serious matter. This is something that has to happen quickly. We have to have the confidence of the American people that we are using these tools appropriately,” said Kenneth Wainstein, the Justice Department’s new assistant attorney general for national security.
More:
In the use of both national security letters and the FISA warrant applications, officials acknowledged that the problems resulted from agents’ haste or sloppiness — or both — and that there was inadequate supervision.
So, what’s the problem?
Experts said Congress, the courts and the Justice Department share the blame for not conducting more aggressive oversight of FBI agents.
You’d think? You mean that not checking information very thoroughly, and conducting just about no oversight leads to ‘inaccuracies’?
Who would have thought?
More at the Gun Toting Liberal and The Heretik.
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