[Ppnews] FBI finds it overstepped in collecting data

[Political Prisoner News]

WP: FBI finds it overstepped in collecting data

Internal audit faults national security investigations

By John Solomon
The Washington Post
Updated: 9:27 p.m. PT June 13, 2007

An internal 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/Federal+Bureau+of+Investigation?tid=informline>FBI 
audit has found that the bureau potentially 
violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 
times while collecting data about domestic phone 
calls, e-mails and financial transactions in 
recent years, far more than was documented in a 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/U.S.+Department+of+Justice?tid=informline>Justice 
Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the 
bureau's national security investigations since 
2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic 
surveillance efforts probably number several 
thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. 
The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The vast majority of the new violations were 
instances in which telephone companies and 
Internet providers gave agents phone and e-mail 
records the agents did not request and were not 
authorized to collect. The agents retained the 
information anyway in their files, which mostly 
concerned suspected terrorist or espionage activities.

But two dozen of the newly-discovered violations 
involved agents' requests for information that 
U.S. law did not allow them to have, according to 
the audit results provided to 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/The+Washington+Post+Company?tid=informline>The 
Washington Post. Only two such examples were 
identified earlier in the smaller sample.

FBI officials said the results confirmed what 
agency supervisors and outside critics feared, 
namely that many agents did not understand or 
follow the required legal procedures and 
paperwork requirements when collecting personal 
information with one of the most sensitive and 
powerful intelligence-gathering tools of the 
post-Sept. 11 era -- the National Security Letter, or NSL.

Such letters are uniformly secret and amount to 
nonnegotiable demands for personal information -- 
demands that are not reviewed in advance by a 
judge. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress 
substantially eased the rules for issuing NSLs, 
requiring only that the bureau certify that the 
records are "sought for" or "relevant to" an 
investigation "to protect against international 
terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

The change -- combined with national anxiety 
about another domestic terrorist event -- led to 
an explosive growth in the use of the letters. 
More than 19,000 such letters were issued in 2005 
seeking 47,000 pieces of information, mostly from 
telecommunications companies. But with this 
growth came abuse of the newly relaxed rules, a 
circumstance first revealed in the Justice 
Department's March report by 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/Glenn+Fine?tid=informline>Inspector 
General Glenn A. Fine.

"The FBI's comprehensive audit of National 
Security Letter use across all field offices has 
confirmed the inspector general's findings that 
we had inadequate internal controls for use of an 
invaluable investigative tool," FBI General 
Counsel Valerie E. Caproni said. "Our internal 
audit examined a much larger sample than the 
inspector general's report last March, but we 
found similar percentages of NSLs that had errors."

"Since March," Caproni added, "remedies 
addressing every aspect of the problem have been 
implemented or are well on the way."

Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by 
the new audit, about 700 involved telephone 
companies and other communications firms 
providing information that exceeded what the 
FBI's national security letters had sought. But 
rather than destroying the unsolicited data, 
agents in some instances issued new National 
Security Letters to ensure that they could keep 
the mistakenly provided information. Officials 
cited as an example the retention of an extra 
month's phone records, beyond the period specified by the agents.

‘Clear lines of responsibility’
Case agents are now told that they must identify 
mistakenly produced information and isolate it 
from investigative files. "Human errors will 
inevitably occur with third parties, but we now 
have a clear plan with clear lines of 
responsibility to ensure errant information that 
is mistakenly produced will be caught as it is 
produced and before it is added to any FBI database," Caproni said.

The FBI also found that in 14 investigations, 
counterintelligence agents using NSLs improperly 
gathered full credit reports from financial 
institutions, exercising authority provided by 
the 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/United+States?tid=informline>USA 
Patriot Act but meant to be applied only in 
counterterrorism cases. In response, the bureau 
has distributed explicit instructions that "you 
can't gather full credit reports in 
counterintelligence cases," a senior FBI official said.

In 10 additional investigations, FBI agents used 
NSLs to request other information that the 
relevant laws did not allow them to obtain. 
Officials said that, for example, agents might 
have requested header information from e-mails -- 
such as the subject lines -- even though NSLs are 
supposed to be used to gather information only 
about the e-mails' senders and the recipients, not about their content.

The FBI audit also identified three dozen 
violations of rules requiring that NSLs be 
approved by senior officials and used only in 
authorized cases. In 10 instances, agents issued 
National Security Letters to collect personal 
data without tying the requests to specific, 
active investigations -- as the law requires -- 
either because, in each case, an investigative 
file had not been opened yet or the authorization 
for an investigation had expired without being renewed.

FBI officials said the audit found no evidence to 
date that any agent knowingly or willingly 
violated the laws or that supervisors encouraged 
such violations. The Justice Department's report 
estimated that agents made errors about 4 percent 
of the time and that third parties made mistakes 
about 3 percent of the time, they said. The FBI's 
audit, they noted, found a slightly higher error 
rate for agents -- about 5 percent -- and a 
substantially higher rate of third-party errors -- about 10 percent.

The officials said they are making widespread 
changes to ensure that the problems do not recur. 
Those changes include implementing a 
corporate-style, continuous, internal compliance 
program to review the bureau's policies, 
procedures and training, to provide regular 
monitoring of employees' work by supervisors in 
each office, and to conduct frequent audits to 
track compliance across the bureau.

The bureau is also trying to establish for NSLs 
clear lines of responsibility, which were lacking 
in the past, officials said. Agents who open 
counterterrorism and counterintelligence 
investigations have been told that they are 
solely responsible for ensuring that they do not 
receive data they are not entitled to have.

The FBI audit did not turn up new instances in 
which another surveillance tool known as an 
Exigent Circumstance Letter had been abused, 
officials said. In a finding that prompted 
particularly strong concerns on 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/related-topics.html/Capitol+Hill?tid=informline>Capitol 
Hill, the Justice Department had said such 
letters -- which are similar to NSLs but are 
meant to be used only in security emergencies -- 
had been invoked hundreds of times in 
"non-emergency circumstances" to obtain detailed 
phone records, mostly without the required links to active investigations.

Many of those letters were improperly dispatched 
by the bureau's Communications Analysis Unit, a 
central clearinghouse for the analysis of 
telephone records such as those gathered with the 
help of "exigent" letters and National Security 
Letters. Justice Department and FBI investigators 
are trying to determine if any FBI headquarters 
officials should be held accountable or punished 
for those abuses, and have begun advising agents 
of their due process rights during interviews.

The FBI audit will be completed in the coming 
weeks, and Congress will be briefed on the 
results, officials said. FBI officials said each 
potential violation will then be extensively 
reviewed by lawyers to determine if it must be 
reported to the Intelligence Oversight Board, a 
presidential panel of senior intelligence 
officials created to safeguard civil liberties.

The officials said the final tally of violations 
that are serious enough to be reported to the 
panel might be much less than the number turned 
up by the audit, noting that only five of the 22 
potential violations identified by the Justice 
Department's inspector general this spring were 
ultimately deemed to be reportable.

"We expect that percentage will hold or be 
similar when we get through the hundreds of 
potential violations identified here," said a 
senior FBI official, who spoke on the condition 
of anonymity because the bureau's findings have not yet been made public.
© 2007 The Washington Post Company

URL: 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19215531/from/ET/>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19215531/from/ET/




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