Constitutional Law

We're from the government, and we're here to save you...

A report from the Justice Dept Inspector General, in pdf, on how well the department is working to prevent terrorism. Let's see...

1) ATFE and FBI are engaged in turf wars over explosives cases. They retain two separate labs for investigation, and race each other to crime scenes in the belief that the agency who gets there first becomes lead agency.

2) FBI has a backlog of untranslated terror-related audio files. They can even say how big it is, but it's somewhere between 4,700 and 47,000 hours of audio. That's not counting other untranslated files and documents. "Our audit concluded that not translating or reviewing counterterrorism and counterintelligence materials can increase the risk that the FBI will not detect information that may be important to its counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts."

3) Justice has a National Gang Information Center. It has no operating budget, and receives about three requests a year from local law enforcement.

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on April 12, 2010 (boomark / email).