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The G-Men and the G-ManThe Justice Department's "historic" new oversight of the FBI is none of those things.

By Patrick Radden KeefePosted Wednesday, July 18, 2007, at 6:16 PM ET

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The changes announced Friday will give DoJ lawyers a "mandate" to obtain information about FBI investigations, as if to suggest that the DoJ couldn't previously get it. But the FBI abuses came to light in the first place because the bureau volunteered the information. In 2005, the Intelligence Oversight Board started sending reports to the attorney general. These documents were based on information furnished by the FBI. So we have a decades-old oversight mechanism that, once it's revived, channeled the relevant information to the attorney general—who either didn't read it or didn't care. In other words, this was a people problem. In response to the Washington Post report, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino explained that the Intelligence Oversight Board was no longer all that relevant because its "primary oversight role has been supplemented" by new bureaucratic agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But the DNI has done perhaps as little as Gonzales to act on the FBI's reports of its own wrongdoing.

The second major flaw in the DoJ's plan is that the proposed oversight will be conducted not by some independent commission, but by the executive branch itself. Given the scorn Gonzales has shown for congressional oversight, it should be little surprise that his grand proposal for oversight leaves responsibility and discretion up to … the agencies that need overseeing. The clearest sign that Gonzales' DoJ should not be entrusted with oversight of FBI investigations can be found in the attorney general's own defense against the accusation that he lied to Congress. When he said in 2005 that no intelligence "abuses" had occurred, he was relying on a dictionary definition of abuse, which entailed deliberation and would rule out simple mistakes, Gonzales and his staff explained. It is true that the majority of the civil liberties infringements turned up by both the DoJ and the FBI were ostensibly inadvertent—telephone companies turning over more private information than federal agents had a right to ask for. But does it really make a difference to the innocent person whose phone records are turned over whether the disclosure was accidental or deliberate?

Defining down abuse is hardly the way to signal that a new dawn of oversight has come. Especially since at the same time the FBI informed Congress that it is launching a new program, the System To Assess Risk, which will sift through public and private information on foreigners, and some American citizens, and assign "risk scores," indicating the likelihood that an individual is a terrorist threat. This kind of tool may be effective, but it is also a privacy violation waiting to happen.

To truly monitor this sort of program, Washington doesn't need new oversight offices—it needs new people in the old offices. The DoJ's plan promises, instead, to further undermine the existing mechanisms by creating new ones, and to give the delicate and important task of oversight to the officials who have demonstrated that they are not up to the job. In lamenting last week the Bush administration's sidelining of the Intelligence Oversight Board in favor of new processes and structures, James B. Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser under President Clinton, remarked, "There is no one watching the henhouse." But under the DoJ's plan, there will indeed be someone watching the henhouse. They've entrusted that job to the fox.