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This quote from AFP summarizes a view conveyed by many news reports:
The United States has been rocked by a series of revelations that officials overstepped their authority in applying tough anti-terror laws brought in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Ron Kessler puts it in perspective:
In an audit, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found minor deficiencies associated with 22 of 293 national security letters he examined from 2003 to 2005.
National security letters are issued in international terrorism and espionage investigations. They are similar to grand jury subpoenas, which are normally issued at the direction of a prosecutor and allow the FBI, in criminal investigations, to obtain financial records and records of calls, e-mails, and Internet searches.
In some cases, the national security letters were issued after the authorized investigation period, or an agent had accidentally transposed the digits in a telephone number of a person under investigation.
In other cases, problems were not the fault of the FBI: Recipients of the letters sometimes turned over more information than requested or provided information about the wrong phone number.
...National security letters do not allow the FBI to wiretap or to see the contents of e-mails.
...Fine specifically found that the FBI had not intentionally violated any rules.
He determined that, with the exception of situations where the recipient made an error, the FBI in most cases had obtained information to which it was, in fact, entitled. He noted the tremendous workload of FBI agents trying to stop the next attack. And he concluded that security letters have contributed significantly to the FBI's counterterrorism effort.
The news accounts either ignored or downplayed these findings. Instead, they played up the story as a massive intrusion into people's personal lives, suggesting the security letters had something to do with monitoring calls rather than simply obtaining subscriber information associated with telephone numbers and e-mail addresses or obtaining financial records.
...Ironically, a table accompanying The Washington Post's Page One story about Fine's report itself contained a typo, listing the number of cases examined by Fine as 273 instead of 293.
...The fact that we have not been attacked in more than five years is due to the effective work of the FBI and the CIA. Every few months, the FBI announces new arrests of terrorists plotting to kill Americans. This is not luck. It is because under Mueller, the FBI has transformed itself into a counterterrorism agency that gathers and uses intelligence to roll up plots before they occur.
