The FBI director apologized to newspapers for improperly (illegally) obtaining phone records of reporters, according to this article on Yahoo. You see, they were doing it while investigating terrorism. They recovered the records by bypassing grand jury subpoenas using "exigent letters," essentially saying time was an issue and going to the grand jury would not allow them to get what they needed quickly enough, but that they requested the subpoenas when in fact they hadn't.
I know, the shock that a government agency under the Bush administration would lie to get around Constitutional due process. Whodathunkit?
Fortunately, the director apologized, so everything is fixed now. The government says they have safeguards in place to keep this from happening again. Of course, the government also told us that we were fighting terrorists so that our freedoms would not be jeopardized - how ironic that they ask us to continue to trust them...
1 comment:
They also said these processes that perform an end run around the constitution were reserved for non-citizens. I suppose the reporters were all aliens.
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