But the stern reminder has not appeased civil-liberties advocates, who want Congress to rein in the FBI's power to obtain consumers' telephone, Internet, and financial records.
"The government should have never had such expansive power to begin with," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's legislative office in Washington, said yesterday. "Current and past administrations have demonstrated that government power exercised in secret will always be abused."
The 24 pages of guidelines came as a new FBI audit of national security letters found more than 1,000 possible violations since 2002. The majority of the abuses, however, were made by companies that gave more information than the FBI sought, said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the audit has not yet been made public.
The FBI's audit sampled about 10 percent of the tens of thousands of NSLs that have been issued from its 56 field offices nationwide. In 2005, for example, the FBI issued 19,000 NSLs seeking 47,000 records, the official said. But investigators found only about two dozen possible violations among the NSLs issued that year, according to the audit, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
In a statement, FBI Assistant Director John Miller said the new audit found the same problems identified by the Justice Department's initial report in March, but "the numbers are larger because we looked through a larger sampling." He said FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III is creating a compliance office to conduct spot checks of NSLs "so that any pattern of mistakes will be identified quickly and remedied quickly."
US Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, called anew yesterday for congressional hearings to examine the violations.
"Tracking terrorists and thwarting attacks is absolutely essential, but when our law enforcement agents ignore the laws intended to protect Americans' civil liberties, they undermine public confidence in our legal system and potentially ensnare innocent Americans in terrorism investigations," Markey stated in a release.
