The average duration between incident and report of the incident is 2.5 YEARS. That's a long time, long enough to make effective investigation difficult -- memories fade, evidence goes stale or missing. EFF estimates that there are as many as 40,000 violations.
You also need to ask: what prompts the report of a routine activity in an investigation 30 months after the activity takes place?
Most scary to me:
"almost one-fifth involved an FBI violation of the Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or other laws governing criminal investigations or intelligence gathering activities"
"From 2001 to 2008, the FBI engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations, including: submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoena, accessing password protected documents without a warrant"
These are serious issues -- this isn't like the local police getting free lunch or looking the other way. You're talking about an FBI agent lying to a grand jury or a Federal judge. Both are serious felonies. Another thing that is disturbing is that it looks like the FBI isn't following its own procedures internally. So the people who are supposedly running the agency have no clue what is happening.
I'm not trying to say that the FBI is like the KGB or is inherently evil. I'd be willing to bet that 98% of the people working there have the best of intentions. But you have a situation where these good people are in highly compartmentalized, secretive units within this massive bureaucracy with this important mission. The middle management is driven to deliver results, but not accountable for their actions.
That combination of mission, drive and unaccountability is a recipe for systematic abuses of power.
You also need to ask: what prompts the report of a routine activity in an investigation 30 months after the activity takes place?
Most scary to me:
"almost one-fifth involved an FBI violation of the Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or other laws governing criminal investigations or intelligence gathering activities"
"From 2001 to 2008, the FBI engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations, including: submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoena, accessing password protected documents without a warrant"
These are serious issues -- this isn't like the local police getting free lunch or looking the other way. You're talking about an FBI agent lying to a grand jury or a Federal judge. Both are serious felonies. Another thing that is disturbing is that it looks like the FBI isn't following its own procedures internally. So the people who are supposedly running the agency have no clue what is happening.
I'm not trying to say that the FBI is like the KGB or is inherently evil. I'd be willing to bet that 98% of the people working there have the best of intentions. But you have a situation where these good people are in highly compartmentalized, secretive units within this massive bureaucracy with this important mission. The middle management is driven to deliver results, but not accountable for their actions.
That combination of mission, drive and unaccountability is a recipe for systematic abuses of power.