On April 27, 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the Senate intelligence committee that Congress should renew the USA PATRIOT Act, saying that there had “not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse.”

But six days earlier, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sent Gonzales a report which said otherwise.

The document, one of more than 350 pages of documents released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation after a Freedom of Information Act request, showed that the FBI used a national security letter and obtained information it was not supposed to have.

The incident was reported to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board, which monitors the government’s surveillance activities for improper activity. Gonzales received a copy.

But Department of Justice officials said it wasn’t clear whether Gonzales had actually read the report before testifying before Congress, and that even if he had, Gonzales was talking about something else entirely.

Two of the earliest reports sent to Gonzales, during his first month on the job, in February 2005, involved the FBI’s surveillance and search powers. In one case, the bureau reported a violation involving an “unconsented physical search” in a counterintelligence case. The details were redacted in the released memo, but it cited violations of safeguards “that shall protect constitutional and other legal rights.” The second violation involved electronic surveillance on phone lines that was reinitiated after the expiration deadline set by a court in a counterterrorism case. . . .

Some of the reports describe rules violations that the FBI decided not to report to the intelligence board. In February 2006, for example, FBI officials wrote that agents sent a person’s phone records, which they had obtained from a provider under a national security letter, to an outside party. The mistake was blamed on “an error in the mail handling.” When the third party sent the material back, the bureau decided not to report the mistake as a violation.

The memos also detail instances in which the FBI wrote out new NSLs to cover evidence that had been mistakenly collected. In a June 30, 2006, e-mail, for instance, an FBI supervisor asked an agent who had “overcollected” evidence under a national security letter to forward his original request to lawyers. “We would like to check the specific language to see if there is anything in the body that would cover the extra material they gave,” the supervisor wrote. — Washington Post

The FBI documents released this week also include more than 60 exigent letters, which the FBI used to request telephone and Internet records, that failed to comply with relevant law and FBI procedures, as well as model national security letters and copies of department procedures.

In March, the DOJ inspector general released a report which said that the FBI repeatedly failed to follow the law and procedure when using national security letters and exigent letters. And an audit released in June found over 1,000 violations in the FBI’s use of national security letters.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York), the chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, quickly called for Gonzales’ resignation, along with the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Gonzales’ statements to Congress and whether the AG and other officials broke the law with the NSA wiretapping program. — Threat Level

EFF filed a lawsuit in April after the FBI failed to respond to its FOIA request on its use of NSLs. Last month a federal judge ordered the FBI to release documents monthly until it has fully complied, which could take over three years due to the sheer volume of documents.

“This is by no means the whole story on NSL abuse,” EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel said. “We’re looking forward to receiving the rest of the documents. Americans deserve the whole story on the FBI’s deeply flawed program to issue NSLs.”

Stay tuned to see what abuses of your rights turn up next month.