Patriot Act abuse calls for action

Freedom News Mexico

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller has confirmed in a Senate hearing that a forthcoming report from the Justice Department’s inspector general will find that abuses by FBI agents in the use of a tool called national security letters (NSLs) occurred in 2006. This comes even after abuses had been documented from 2003-05, and congressional committees had urged the FBI to eliminate them.

He emphasized, however, that the 2006 abuse “predates the reforms we now have in place.”

We would like to believe that Mueller (who has been, on balance, a better FBI director than we expected) is correct, that administrative procedures really have reduced such privacy abuses substantially. But the record is not encouraging.