President Obama’s nomination of Valerie Caproni, who left the FBI in 2011, to be a judge in the Southern District of New York has reopened the issue of FBI abuses of intelligence-gathering tools during the Bush Administration — raised anew the fact that no one has ever been penalized for it.
While she was general counsel, Caproni had legal oversight over the use of national security letters, or NSLs, and exigent letters, were used to obtain phone and e-mail records of U.S. citizens and residents without a court sign-off. According to the New York Times, a series of reports from 2007 to 2010 revaled that DOJ’s Inspector General pointed out that FBI agents over a three-year period ending in 2005 served more than 140,000 national security letters on companies without retaining evidence that the data collection was legal, without ensuring that the data were relevant to government needs and without correctly reporting efforts to Congress. Exigent letters are supposed to be used only in emergencies and followed up by documentation of an underlying investigation, which was never done.
Publicly available information does not indicate anyone was ever punished, or that any victim was ever made whole after their privacy was violated.