The FBI engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority in illegally gathering telephone, email and financial records of Americans and foreigners while hunting terrorists, the Justice Department’s chief inspector said Tuesday. The FBI’s failure to establish sufficient controls or oversight for collecting the information through so-called national security letters constituted “serious and unacceptable” failures, said Glenn A Fine, the internal watchdog who revealed the data-gathering abuses in a 130-page report last week.Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Fine said he did not believe the problems were intentional, but were generally the result of confusion and carelessness.“It really was unacceptable and inexcusable what happened here,” Fine said under questioning.Democrats said Fine’s findings were an example of how the Justice Department has used broad counterterrorism authorities by the Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to trample on privacy rights.“This was a serious breach of trust,” said Representative John Conyers, the Judiciary chairman. “The department had converted this tool into a shortcut to illegally gather vast amounts of private information while at the same time significantly underreporting its activities to Congress.”Representative James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the committee’s former Republican chairman, said: “I hope this will be a lesson to the FBI that they can’t get away with this and expect to maintain public support.” Other Republicans, however, said the FBI’s expanded spying powers were vital to tracking terrorists.“The problem is enforcement of the law, not the law itself,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the committee’s senior GOP member. Valerie Caproni, the FBI’s general counsel, took responsibility for the abuses detailed in Fine’s report. “We’re going to have to work to get the trust of this committee back,” she said.In a review of headquarters files and a sampling of just four of the FBI’s 56 field offices, Fine found 48 violations of law or presidential directives during 2003-2005 and estimated that “a significant number of.violations throughout the FBI have not been identified or reported.”The bureau has launched an audit of all 56 field offices. The Senate Judiciary Committee is to hear on Wednesday from Fine and FBI Director Robert Mueller on the same topic.
