counterterrorism official said getting access to them was as easy as
“having an ATM in your living room,” according to a watchdog report
made public Wednesday.
At times, telecom employees invited
Between 2003 and 2006, one
In the letters,
the urgent nature of the investigation and pledged to follow up with
prosecutor-approved subpoenas later. The letters were issued without
court oversight.
“We found that many
employees issued or approved these exigent letters even though the
letters on their face contained statements that were inaccurate, such
as that a grand jury subpoena had already been submitted,” the report
said.
The report is the inspector general’s third slamming of the bureau’s handling of requests for Americans’ personal records.
When the inspector general’s investigators asked
officials about the abuses, “they gave a variety of unpersuasive
excuses, contending either that they thought someone else had reviewed
or approved the letters or that they had inherited the practice and
were not in a position to change it,” the report said
Describing it a “widespread failure” by
“For
unquestioningly issue hundreds of these improper and inaccurate letters
over a 3 1/2-year period is both surprising and troubling,” the report
said.
FBI Director
did not find out about the abuses until 2006, told senators Wednesday
that the bureau had since stopped the practices and would be
determining whether or not to punish employees.
The practice started soon after the
Fine’s investigators concluded that the use of the
letters was an improper way to circumvent the more formal national
security letters process, which requires approval from supervisors.
One
general that the unit that issued the letters was supposed to develop a
“phone database on steroids” that would identify “good” versus “bad”
numbers that could be useful in terrorism investigations.
To help gather this information, the bureau entered
into contracts with three telecom companies. Employees from the
companies worked in the bureau’s offices alongside agents to analyze
telephone records, which included names, addresses, length of service
and billing information.
But for much of the time, there was no formal policy outlining when exigent letters could be issued.
issued because of emergency or life-or-death situations. In some cases,
the records were connected to bomb threats, but in others they were
related to non-emergency matters such as media leak investigations.
Managers also admitted that they did not read the
letters closely when they signed them and did not know that they were
expected to follow up with a subpoena.
“None of these
records — either the exigent letters or other informal requests — was
accompanied by documentation explaining the authority for the
requests,” the report said.
In some cases,
bother with the letters and simply asked in e-mails or Post-It notes
for records related to more than 3,500 telephone numbers.
They also began an informal practice known as “sneak
peeks” in which they obtained records — often on a weekly basis — from
the company’s database without any formal request.
investigators that he saw no problem with the practice because it was
“his understanding that there was no expectation of privacy in
telephone records because the ‘numbers belong to the phone companies.'”
Some numbers were later uploaded to
databases and used to analyze what the bureau called a “community of
interest.” The definition of the community of interest was redacted
from the report, making it difficult to discern whose records were
reviewed and what the
Since the inspector general’s investigation, the
has concluded that records for hundreds of telephone numbers must be
purged from the bureau’s database because there was no national
security investigation that justified obtaining them.
—
(c) 2010, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Visit the
