A federal court rightly rebuked the FBI last year for breaking the law and violating the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches in its use of government records of communications collected without a court warrant.

Making the court finding revealed Tuesday all the more striking was that the violations were carried out under the Trump administration, which has made quite an issue about FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016. Indeed, FBI Director Christopher Wray argued, unsuccessfully, that complying with the law would put an unacceptable administrative burden on the agency.

The finding breathes life into the contention that there may be a culture within the FBI that verges on contempt for the law. If so, it must be thoroughly stamped out.

The Justice Department appealed the secret ruling of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to a special appeals panel and rightly lost, leading to the publication this week of the heavily censored 2018 court decision.

Although the Justice Department has agreed to abide by the courts order that it keep meticulous records of any request to extract information from a secret database of millions of telephone calls and other communications, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision raises serious questions about the agencys ability to monitor abuses.

The communications database is maintained by the National Security Agency, the nations collector of electronic communications for intelligence use. It is authorized by law, but the NSA was ordered in 2017 to purge millions of records collected in violation of the law and was only authorized to resume collection in 2018. The NSA is said to be reconsidering the usefulness of the bulk collection program, which sweeps up communications by foreign intelligence targets including those that might involve U.S. citizens and residents.

The collection process is known as upstream intelligence gathering. The use of the data by the CIA, FBI and other federal intelligence agencies is known as downstream intelligence work. The downstream exploitation of the data is supposed to be governed by the Fourth Amendment and require a court order before communications by U.S. citizens and residents can be queried by intelligence analysts.

The intelligence court found that the FBI was the only downstream data user not in compliance with a new law requiring detailed record-keeping. It cited examples of FBI abuse that included asking for data on all 57,000 FBI employees and contractors and the use of the database by one contractor employee to keep tabs on his relatives.

These examples may only be the tip of an iceberg of unauthorized snooping. The court found that the FBIs system for monitoring potential abuses of the communications database examined only a fraction of the occasions when the database was used by one of its employees or contractors.

Until better controls are put in place, the excessively large number of people and contractors entitled to query the database is bound to make it hard for the FBI to verify that it is complying with the law and the Constitution as directed by the intelligence court.

That should be an issue for Congress as it considers renewing a different surveillance authority known as Section 215 of the Patriot Act that expires at the end of December. It allows the government to obtain a secret court order requiring telephone companies to hand over any records or other tangible thing if deemed relevant to international terrorism or undefined clandestine intelligence activity.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has raised some serious red flags about the FBIs use and abuse of it surveillance authorities. Its important that the FBI follows the law and the Constitution.

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Editorial: FBI caught breaking the rules | Editorials - Charleston Post Courier