So Far, The FBI Is Benefiting The Most From The NSA Leaks
The outrage over massive, pervasive surveillance has put the NSA in the spotlight, somewhere its officials are obviously uncomfortable being. The administration's minimal efforts to address domestic surveillance have also focused on the agency. But there's an agency doing just as much privacy-invading as the NSA and its efforts are now going largely unnoticed, as Emily Berman points out at Just Security.
Commissions, oversight boards, and review groups are all the rage these days. Recent weeks have seen hundreds of pages of reports evaluating American intelligence agencies, and there’s a promise of more to come. These reports have recommended dozens of modifications affecting all three branches of government. But there’s an integral part of the surveillance state that has thus far largely escaped the current scrutiny: the FBI. And while failure to “connect the dots” is an oft-cited flaw within the intelligence community, not insisting on examining more closely the FBI’s surveillance activities represents a similar flaw by those outside the intelligence community.
The FBI is now basking in the darkness the NSA used to occupy. The first leak had the FBI's name all over it, and it's the power granted to the FBI that allows the NSA to collect millions of domestic phone records. The NSA technically isn't allowed to vacuum up domestic records. The FBI, however, is. But the NSA "takes home" the bulk collection and "tips" a few hundred phone numbers to the agency whose name is listed on the first page.
