ACLU slams new FBI guidelines on privacy

WASHINGTON, June 14 (UPI) -- The American Civil Liberties Union Thursday criticized new FBI guidelines on National Security Letters as being still too weak.

The ACLU said in a statement that it doubted the new guidelines "will be sufficient to protect the privacy of Americans."

"The FBI has reworked their internal methods only because Office of the Inspector General released a report in March outlining egregious abuses of their NSL authority," the human rights group said.

"Unfortunately, these NSL guidelines are not enough," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said in a statement.

"Though the guidelines might prove helpful to improve FBI management, the unchecked authority given to the bureau in the Patriot Act is the core problem," Fredrickson said. "Congress must go back to the legislative drawing board and rein in the broad NSL authorities expanded by the Patriot Act."

"The government should have never had such expansive power to begin with," she said. "Current and past administrations have demonstrated that government power exercised in secret will always be abused. Judicial oversight is the only way to ensure that the FBI will consistently obey the law and respect Americans' right to privacy."

"The IG report revealed that the FBI can't be trusted to follow the rule of law when the public is not watching, a concept made painfully clear by the abuses described in the inspector general's report," Fredrickson said. "The fact is the bureau already had a series of policies, guidelines and statutes in place when these abuses were committed. The NSL statute is like a faulty foundation -- building new guidelines with a faulty law will make for an unsteady structure."

The Democratic-controlled 110th Congress is attempting to assert more active oversight over U.S. domestic security surveillance than the previous Republican-controlled congresses did following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.