Federal foul-up

The federal Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General slams the FBI for its use of part of the Patriot Act in a report released just today. The provision at the heart of the report is Section 215, often called the "library provision" for its potential for secretly digging up the reading habits of library patrons with relatively little oversight. The most interesting aspect of this report is not the extent to which J. Edgar's people tread on anybody's civil liberties, but instead the degree to which they managed to turn implementation of Section 215 into a cock-up worthy of the Keystone Kops.

According to "A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Use of Section 215 Orders for Business Records", Section 215 is a provision that "allows the FBI to seek orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for 'any tangible things,' including books, records, and other items from any business, organization or entity provided the item or items are for an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Overall, Section 215 is supposed to provide a streamlined process, with a lower evidentiary threshold, for the FBI to go digging for information not just about people under investigation, but also about people connected with the targets of investigation.

It hasn't worked out that way. The report details delay after delay, usually due to departmental in-fighting or bureaucratic hassles. Two abuses of the 215 process were uncovered, but they are attributed to incompetence rather than malice. The FBI never even developed formal procedures for implementing Section 215 requests, leaving the provision to be handles on an ad hoc basis. Basically, the FBI was handed a powerful, potentially dangerous tool -- and fumbled the thing.

We uncovered no evidence of harm to national security in any specific cases caused by the delay in obtaining Section 215 orders or by the FBI's inability to obtain information that was requested in Section 215 requests. However, we found that the multi-layered review process, combined with the other impediments described above, resulted in long delays in obtaining Section 215 orders. As a result, the FBI did not receive approval to obtain the Section 215 information until many months after the original request was made.

The result of all of that fumbling and bumbling?

[T]he evidence showed no instance where the information obtained from a Section 215 order resulted in a major case development, such as the disruption of a terrorist plot.

I take it as encouraging that a government agency can be handed such secretive power and not turn it into a significant civil liberties crisis. On the other hand, we were spared not by the FBI's benign intent, but by the bureau's sheer inability to overcome its own bureaucratic inertia.

Maybe, at the end of the day, that's our best defense against government overreach.