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.
