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Enforcing The Enforcer: Enhancing The Fbi’S Accountability For The Use Of National Security Letters, Joshua C. Mcdaniel

Joshua C. McDaniel

In 2007, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General issued the first in a series of three reports revealing that on thousands of occasions the FBI had improperly or illegally used its authority to issue national security letters. The national security letter enables the FBI to obtain confidential customer information from banks, ISPs, telephone companies, and other institutions without first obtaining a warrant or a grand jury subpoena and without the customer ever realizing.

This Comment argues that the abuses of NSL authority revealed in the Inspector General’s reports result significantly from the FBI’s lack of horizontal accountability …