The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report of the FBI’s Russian investigation has fully exposed one more dangerous aspect of the steady abuses of national-security surveillance against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of the national security abuses of the National Security Agency exposed the massive surveillance of U.S. citizens in the expanded campaign against terrorism. Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the DoJ, has highlighted the abuses of the FBI and the misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over an extended period. It will require a comprehensive and bipartisan congressional reform program to gain control over national-security wiretapping.
There will always be tension and room for abuse in maintaining a balance between the openness and transparency required by a democratic society and the covert requirements of secret institutions within the society. The Bureau of Investigations, which was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 1935, has been a particular problem in this regard, dating back to the 1920s, when Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone selected J. Edgar Hoover to stop the excesses of the Justice Department’s activities against political radicals.