The Washington Post: FBI broke law for years in phone record searches
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 [...]
And this is what they’re admitting. They would declare that a request was an emergency, and then they’d make up the emergency after the fact.
Eventually, FBI officials shifted to a second strategy of crafting a “blanket” national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases.
The officials who implemented these policies should spend a long time in jail. The law provides a sentence of up to 10,000 years in jail for these crimes. I’d settle for a decade.
