FBI Lied to Get ISPs to Turn Over Data

In March, the Justice Department’s Inspector General revealed that FBI agents had sent a flurry of fake emergency letters to phone companies, asking them to turn over phone records immediately by promising that the proper papers had been filed with US attorneys, though in many cases this was a complete lie. More than 60 of these letters were made public as part of a FBI document dump in response to a government sunshine lawsuit centered on the FBI’s abuse of a key Patriot Act power