Haven’t heard about any abuses of the Patriot Act recently? It’s not because no one is looking. The Patriot Act requires the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General to collect complaints about alleged civil liberties abuses and to put out a report every six months cataloging the findings. The first one of these reports made front-page news a few years ago when the press failed to understand the difference between allegations of abuses and actual cases of abuses; the New York Times, for example, accidentally reported the former as the latter. When it became clear that the allegations were unfounded, the story quickly fell out of the media spotlight.
These days, the DOJ OIG report comes and goes with no fanfare or press attention. Why? Because the DOJ isn’t finding much in the way of abuses, and isn’t finding anything at all related to the Patriot Act.
Consider the stats from the latest report, released on Friday. DOJ received 1,943 complaints about alleged civil liberties abuses. Of these, 1,748 either did not warrant an investigation or were outside DOJ’s jurisdiction:
Approximately three-quarters of the 1,748 complaints made allegations that did not warrant an investigation. For example, some of the complaints alleged that government agents were broadcasting signals that interfere with a person’s thoughts or dreams or that prison officials had laced the prison food with hallucinogenic drugs. The remaining one-quarter of the 1,748 complaints in this category involved allegations against agencies or entities outside of the DOJ, including other federal agencies, local governments, or private businesses. We referred those complaints to the appropriate entity or advised complainants of the entity with jurisdiction over their allegations.
Of the 195 complaints that did warrant investigation, 170 involved what the report describes as “management issues” rather than civil liberties abuses, such as reports by “inmates [who] complained about the general conditions at federal prisons, such as the poor quality of the food or the lack of hygiene products.”
DOJ requested additional information of the remaining 25 cases, and did not receive responses from complainants in 12 of the cases. Of the remaining 13 cases, one was a sexual harassment complaint against a prison guard, and the rest raised “largely administrative” mattters. The report does not detail the nature of the allegations, but does add that “none of the complaints . . . processed . . . alleged misconduct by DOJ employees relating to use of a provision in the Patriot Act.”
Of course, the fact that the DOJ isn’t finding any Patriot Act-related abuses doesn’t mean that no abuses have occurred. DOJ’s jurisdiction is limited, and not all abuses are likely to lead to reports. At the same time, it’s interesting to note that the DOJ report is consistently failing to find any misconduct related to the Patriot Act.
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