Frequent Errors In FBI’s Secret Records Requests, By John Solomon and Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writers
A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI’s use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.
The inspector general’s audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations — some of which were potential violations of law — in a sampling of 293 “national security letters.” The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases. …
The use of national security letters has grown exponentially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2005 alone, the audit found, the FBI issued more than 19,000 such letters, amounting to 47,000 separate requests for information.
Report Details Missteps in Data Collection, “By R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Staff Writer
Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda’s — 52,000 — and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.
The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board. …
“We believe,” the inspector general’s office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, “that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI.” …
Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 — involving a total of 24,937 “U.S. persons” (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.
The inspector general’s report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI’s use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had “significantly” underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher. …
The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general’s report. About half of the FBI’s field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.