As the editor of the story, I can say the point of the story is that Congress has given out the administrative subpoena very widely and there's almost no supervision whatsoever of them. You blithely conclude that "the overwhelming majority" does not include "abusing process" and are "in the clear service of the public good."
But you're just making that up. The point of the story is that this is a VERY powerful tool, especially since the subpoena targets are often THIRD parties who have no incentive or desire whatsoever to fight them (with the notable exception of Twitter -- thanks @amac).
The only reporting that's required by Congress is on anti-terror subpoenas, and the number of those fell only AFTER two required Inspector General reports found the FBI routinely violating the law, conspiring with AT&T and Verizon and going after reporters.
While your optimism about the authorities seems genuine, I can't see at all how there's any data to support it.
Are you kidding me? You and I both believe the government routinely abuses its power, but in this conversation, you are the only one who apparently believes they spend most of their time abusing that power. No, they spend most of their time doing the incredibly boring, mostly depressing stuff we pay them to do, like making sure tiny restaurant chains in Texas aren't secretly trying to pay their staff under minimum wage by subpoenaing their payroll.
When the DoJ Inspector General investigated the FBI's use of National Security Letters in the year 2006, nearly 50,000 Americans were targeted by them. Following his report, the next year the FBI used them on Americans less than 17,000 times. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/mystery-nsl/
Since then the FBI's Counter-terror division, alone among all government agencies, instituted a comprehensive tracking tool for administrative subpoenas. The numbers have stayed low ever since.
Someday we'll see the numbers from the DoJ criminal division and from the DEA, and I'll bet they are huge and have almost no oversight.
The story made very clear that admin subpoenas began as ways for the regulatory state to police things like minimum wage, and then soon came to eat citizens' Fourth Amendment rights, thanks to irrational campaigns of fear like the "Wars" on drugs and terror.
Which is another way of saying, I'm willing to bet that the majority of administrative subpoenas these days are targeted at individuals in connection with investigations into potential violations of criminal statutes, rather than at businesses.
I actually believe they are abusing it in 90% of the cases. They are using "anti-terror" tools given to them by the Congress in pretty much all cases but the "terror" situations.
But you're just making that up. The point of the story is that this is a VERY powerful tool, especially since the subpoena targets are often THIRD parties who have no incentive or desire whatsoever to fight them (with the notable exception of Twitter -- thanks @amac).
The only reporting that's required by Congress is on anti-terror subpoenas, and the number of those fell only AFTER two required Inspector General reports found the FBI routinely violating the law, conspiring with AT&T and Verizon and going after reporters.
While your optimism about the authorities seems genuine, I can't see at all how there's any data to support it.