A new audit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of national security letters to gain access to information about domestic phone calls, e-mails and personal financial information revealed over 1,000 cases where agents may have violated the law or regulations governing the use of the letters.

The audit, conducted in response to a March report by the Department of Justice inspector general which found 22 violations in a small sampling, reviewed 10 percent of national security investigations since 2002.

The FBI said this week that it had issued new guidelines regarding the use of national security letters in order to cut down on the number of errors, but critics said that the errors rise to the level of abuse.

“The FBI’s comprehensive audit of National Security Letter use across all field offices has confirmed the inspector general’s findings that we had inadequate internal controls for use of an invaluable investigative tool,” FBI General Counsel Valerie E. Caproni said. “Our internal audit examined a much larger sample than the inspector general’s report last March, but we found similar percentages of NSLs that had errors.”

“Since March,” Caproni added, “remedies addressing every aspect of the problem have been implemented or are well on the way.”

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved telephone companies and other communications firms providing information that exceeded what the FBI’s national security letters had sought. But rather than destroying the unsolicited data, agents in some instances issued new National Security Letters to ensure that they could keep the mistakenly provided information. Officials cited as an example the retention of an extra month’s phone records, beyond the period specified by the agents. — Washington Post

In addition, thePost reports, in 14 cases the FBI obtained consumer credit reports for counterintelligence investigations, when the law only authorizes the government to obtain full credit reports for counterterrorism investigations. In ten other investigations, the FBI gathered information, such as e-mail content, which the law prohibits it from obtaining. And in several other cases, the FBI isssued national security letters without tying them to an active investigation, as required by law.

The FBI has instituted a new training and quality assurance program to ensure that agents know when they can and cannot use national security letters, but many say that isn’t enough.

“Though the guidelines might prove helpful to improve FBI management, the unchecked authority given to the Bureau in the Patriot Act is the core problem,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office. “Congress must go back to the legislative drawing board . . . The government should have never had such expansive power to begin with.”

“The new FBI guidelines regarding the use of NSLs fall far short of protecting the privacy of innocent Americans,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.),who serves on the bipartisan Patriot Act Reform Caucus. “These abuses by the DOJ and FBI have proven that legislative fixes are necessary.”

“These new revelations make it clearer than ever that Congress should repeal PATRIOT’s expansion of NSL powers and reform the PATRIOT Act as a whole,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation activism coordinator Derek Slater. The EFF urged a federal judge to order the records released, as part of its ongoing lawsuit it filed in April regarding the abuse of national security letters, and on Friday, the judge agreed.

Now the Justice Department must turn over 2,500 pages of documents a month to the EFF, including information on cozy surveillance contracts between the FBI and telephone companies and information on how data captured by NSLs were put into the FBI’s massive data mining warehouse.

The Justice Department told the court that there were more than 100,000 potentially responsive documents and that ten people are working full time on filling the request for documents. — Threat Level

That’s 40 months if my math is correct. This story of how the government, when given an inch, takes a mile, is going to go on for a very long time.