Not very inspiring news regarding the Patriot Act today:

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

And for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found.

FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to the 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.
...
At issue are the security letters, a power outlined in the Patriot Act that the Bush administration pushed through Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The letters, or administrative subpoenas, are used in suspected terrorism and espionage cases. They allow the FBI to require telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses to produce highly personal records about their customers or subscribers _ without a judge's approval.
...
In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 letters. By however, that number jumped to 39,000. It rose again the next year, to about 56,000 letters in 2004, and dropped to approximately 47,000 in 2005.
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The FBI vastly underreported the numbers. In 2005, the FBI told Congress that its agents in 2003 and 2004 had delivered only 9,254 national security letters seeking e-mail, telephone or financial information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents over the previous two years.

These are actually pretty scary things.  You can have your records searched, and in most, if not all cases, it is against the law for the company served with the "letter" (either your bank or ISP) to even tell you about it.

The irony over the whole thing of course, is that it's these exact same types of letters that caused us to fight the Revolutionary War.  They are almost identical to a Writ of Assistance, and is what lead to the inclusion of the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights.  How quickly we forget.