DOJ failed to issue key wiretap report during Bush’s ENTIRE second term

DOJ failed to issue key wiretap report during Bush’s second term

By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, February 13, 2012 9:41 EST

For the Bush administration’s entire second term, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to tell Congress how many intrusive wiretaps were carried out by law enforcement, despite a legal requirement that it produce an annual report detailing the practice, a security researcher has learned.

At the same time, Congress shirked its duties as a watchdog and apparently didn’t even ask for the report, Wired reporter David Kravets noted Monday morning.

The reports, detailing the use of pen registers and trap and trace devices — wiretap methods that reveal a subject’s communications, and who a subject is communicating with, all in real time — were obtained by privacy activist Christopher Soghoian, who used a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to shoehorn out not just the reports, but a series of revealing emails as well.



One of the emails (PDF) — a 2009 exchange between the former deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs and a staffer for former Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) — lays the situation bare: “I am pleased to attach the criminal pen/trap reports for the last five years,” the DOJ’s Mark Agrast wrote. “The Criminal Division recently discovered that reports had not been filed for 2004 and subsequent years, so they filed all of the reports in 2009.”

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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/congress-in-the-dark/
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/13/doj-failed-to-give-wiretap-data-to-congress-during-bushs-whole-second-term/