Alright. I lied. I’m not going to post on why I think FBI went to the trouble of getting an OLC opinion that, apparently, opens a huge loophole in privacy protections from data collection until I first lay out all four OLC opinions that we know of that appear to be at least partly responses [...]

Yesterday, I did a post on what the DOJ IG Report on “Exigent Letters” revealed about the January 8, 2010 OLC opinion exploiting some kind of huge loophole in the Stored Communications Act. Today, I’m going to look at why–three and a half years after the abuse of exigent letters supposedly ended–Obama’s DOJ felt the [...]

Update: Bob Schacht asked for more context, so here goes. This IG Report was the third DOJ’s Inspector General, Glenn Fine, has done on the FBI’s use of National Security Letters and “exigent letters,” though this is the first to focus almost exclusively on exigent letters. In 2003, the FBI installed representatives of AT&T and [...]

As I reported yesterday, the Dawn Johnsen-less OLC wrote an opinion on January 8 retroactively authorizing the FBI’s inappropriate use of the exigent letters to snoop on Americans’ telecomm records. Now, Senators Feingold, Durbin, and Wyden, have demanded that opinion from Eric Holder. Of note, they tie their demand into DOJ IG Glenn Fine’s comment [...]

The WaPo has a story out describing how the FBI, from 2002 until 2006, used exigent letters to collect phone records without the proper underlying terrorist justification. The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies [...]

A second working thread on the EFF documents.

John Conyers has submitted three more bills designed to increase versigh tof the executive branch.

Russ Feingold says we need more information about how the PATRIOT Act actually works before we renew the PATRIOT Act.

On April 3, DOJ submitted a filing that argued that no citizen had the ability to sue if she had been wrongly wiretapped under Bush’s illegal wiretap program. On August 15, we learn that DOJ’s Inspector General “recently” learned of “significant misconduct” in the wiretap program. Did Holder know of that “significant misconduct” when his DOJ made those expansive claims?

Surprise surprise. The warrantless wiretapping program is still illegally wiretapping Americans.