Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? It doesn't matter because they weren't watching to begin with:
An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.
If over 1,000 incidents of breaking the law were uncovered in just ten percent of the national security investigations, it is not at all unrealistic to assume the possibility that in all one hundred percent of the cases, there might be a total of at least 10,000 violations of the law and agency policy. That is pretty damn serious when you think that that could easily work out to being several violations per special agent involved. One of the things that has been proved over this same time as well is that it is not possible to trust the government, as an institution, with the security of our records and to comply with its own laws that cover acquiring that data.
We often make too much of reports like this, thinking that transparency itself is going to wipe away the crime. That is terribly naive. Despite all of the negative publicity on the New York City and Atlanta governments for the Albert Spruill and Kathryn Johnston cases, there has been little reform. Even now, they're trying to renege on them. All transparency has accomplished is laying bare the fact that the system is getting increasingly screwed up. No one in the system is doing anything about it, from selectively bleeding heart liberals to law-and-order conservatives.
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