Federal Agencies Ignore FOIA, Issue Administrative Orders

[From article]
Nobody knows how many administrative subpoenas are issued by government agencies. Administrative subpoenas are warrants for records such as private “papers” and emails. They are issued unilaterally by government bureaucrats and are impossible to reconcile with the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of “oath and affirmation” of “probable cause” before neutral judges.
Watson and The Daily Caller News Foundation have been doing the work that Congress has failed to do in its oversight functions and have issued multiple FOIA requests to various government agencies to get a sense of how many of these subpoenas are issued.
[. . .]
Reporting by the press, it appears, is really what the FTC believes is interfering with its law enforcement activities.
As I’ve written, administrative subpoenas are relics of the Star Chamber, the notoriously secretive and abusive king’s council that the English despised and eventually outlawed in 1641. And unilaterally issued warrants were considered unlawful even before the Fourth Amendment was written.
[. . .]
Administrative subpoenas are frequently used as bureaucratic weapons to punish or intimidate businesses and others. As reported at National Law Journal, one company “put out of business under the weight of a Federal Trade Commission data-privacy investigation is now suing three agency attorneys for allegedly bringing a case based on ‘fictional’ evidence.”
[. . .]
Bureaucrats need to comply with the Fourth Amendment. Warrants require probable cause and oath and affirmation before neutral judges.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/11/ftc_goes_star_chamber_on_warrant_transparency.html

November 28, 2015
FTC goes 'Star Chamber' on warrant transparency
By Mark J. Fitzgibbons