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FBI cast wide net when targeting phone records FBI demands to telecommunications companies went beyond requesting phone records of customers under suspicion to include analyses of their broader patterns of communication with others as well, newly obtained documents show. The Federal Bureau of Investigation used national security letters to request information on the wider “community of interest” linked to individuals under suspicion, according to the documents. The data-mining technique can lay bare phone and e-mail links that tie together otherwise indiscernible networks of individuals. Law enforcement officials value that sort of data as a means of identifying a suspect’s potential conspirators. Privacy advocates say it can ensnare people with no tie to illegal or suspicious activity. The “community of interest” requests were included in more than 2,500 pages of FBI documents the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The New York Times first reported on the requests in a story posted to its Web site Saturday. The FBI letters use boilerplate language to request companies provide calling records for redacted lists of telephone numbers, citing “exigent circumstances.” An Aug. 9, 2005, letter and others from that year also include the following: “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.” Earlier this year, the Justice Department’s inspector general uncovered 700 cases in which FBI agents obtained telephone records through such “exigent letters,” which asserted that grand jury subpoenas had been requested for the data when in fact such subpoenas never had been sought. The FBI eliminated use of the letters earlier this year....
Judge rules against FBI data-gathering tool A federal district judge yesterday struck down a key section of the USA Patriot Act that allows the FBI to secretly seize personal records about customers from Internet service providers, phone companies, banks, libraries, and other businesses without a judge's permission. The Patriot Act provision allowed investigators, at their own discretion, to issue a type of administrative subpoena known as a "National Security Letter" to businesses as part of an inquiry into suspected spies or terrorists. The company would then have to turn over the requested records, and its employees would be banned from telling anyone about the subpoena. Because US District Court Judge Victor Marrero gave the government 90 days to appeal his order, the FBI does not have to stop issuing National Security Letters immediately. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the Bush administration is considering whether to appeal. "We are reviewing the decision and considering our options at this time," Boyd said. In his 103-page ruling, Marrero said the Patriot Act provision on National Security Letters violates both "the First Amendment and the principle of separation of powers" because it gags recipients of the subpoenas and doesn't provide adequate court oversight. "In light of the seriousness of the potential intrusion into the individual's personal affairs and the significant possibility of a chilling effect on speech and association - particularly of expression that is critical of the government or its policies - a compelling need exists to ensure that the use of National Security Letters is subject to the safeguards of public accountability, checks and balances, and separation of powers that our Constitution prescribes," wrote Marrero, an appointee of President Clinton....
U.S. may invoke 'state secrets' to squelch suit against Swift The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show. The lawsuit against the banking consortium, which is known as Swift, threatens to disrupt the operations of a vital national security program and to reveal "highly classified information" if it is allowed to continue, the Justice Department said in several recent court filings asserting its strong interest in seeing the lawsuit dismissed. A hearing on the future of the lawsuit was scheduled for Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. The "state secrets" privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower's claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect. Most notably, the Bush administration has sought to use the state secrets assertion to kill numerous lawsuits against telecommunications carriers over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping program, but a judge in California rejected that claim. The issue is now pending before an appeals court, where judges in a hearing two weeks ago expressed skepticism about the administration's claims....
Point, Click ... Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected. It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert. DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network. Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers. The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.) DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders. A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists....
Wiretaps on the rise nationally since 9/11 Investigators have tapped more phones, listened to more people and recorded more conversations since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks not only in terrorism probes, but in traditional criminal cases, too. State and federal courts authorized 8,122 wiretaps for domestic criminal investigations in the first five years after Sept. 11, 2001, marking a nearly 25 percent increase over the previous five years. Judges denied wiretap applications only twice. Those figures do not include the controversial warrantless wiretaps that are backed by the Bush administration as a terrorism-fighting tool. Nor do they include thousands of wiretaps in which a secret court approves warrants in counterterrorism and espionage cases. The increase in criminal wiretaps, which require warrants, matches a climate since the attacks in which law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials have blurred the lines between combating terrorism and conventional crime....
Lawmakers Challenge Plan to Expand Spying Senior House Democrats called on the Bush administration yesterday to delay a planned Oct. 1 expansion of the use of powerful satellite and aircraft spy technology by local and federal law enforcement agencies, challenging the plan's legality and charging that the administration is failing to safeguard the privacy of Americans. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and two Democratic subcommittee chairmen jointly asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide the legal framework for the domestic use of classified and military spy satellites, and to allow Congress to review privacy and civil liberties protections. "You let this thing go, it may be another blank check to the executive. It may morph into things that will terrify you if you really understand the capabilities of satellites," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), former ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee. Their demand was made in a letter after DHS officials testified about the spying program at a hearing, and signaled that administration officials had not succeeded in quieting Democrats' concerns about the intrusiveness of the satellite technology -- which was created primarily for foreign surveillance -- and the novelty of its proposed use by state and local police officials....
Terrorism Watch List Is Faulted For Errors The government's master watch list of known or suspected terrorists continues to be marred by errors and inconsistencies that can obstruct the capture of terrorists or cause innocent people to be detained by U.S. authorities, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday. As one of the most powerful intelligence tools created by the Bush administration after the 2001 attacks, the watch list is used to screen about 270 million people a month and its content can determine whether people are allowed to fly on airplanes or detained after routine traffic stops. Its size has more than quadrupled since its creation in 2004, to the point that it contained more than 720,000 records as of April, according to the new report. It is growing at the rate of more than 20,000 records a month. But Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said its management by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) "continues to have significant weaknesses," producing a high error rate and a slow response to complaints from citizens. In an examination of 105 records, for example, the auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies that the TSC's own quality-assurance efforts had not found. They also discovered that the TSC is operating two versions of the database in tandem without ensuring that their contents are identical, which they said could result in missed opportunities to identify terrorists....
Report blasts TSA air cargo security The Transportation Security Administration's program for keeping bombs out of airplane cargo holds is riddled with holes that leave passenger planes vulnerable to attack, a government investigation shows. The TSA has too few cargo inspectors, an ineffective database to track violations and "vague regulations" for screening cargo being put on passenger planes, the Homeland Security Department inspector general said in a report released Thursday. Inspector General Richard Skinner said the TSA system "increases the opportunities (to put) explosives, incendiaries and other dangerous devices on passenger aircraft." Passenger planes carry 7,500 tons of cargo a day in storage areas under passenger cabins that also hold luggage. Airlines typically lease a portion of their cargo holds to freight companies, and last year earned $4.4 billion from cargo operations, according to the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group. The TSA largely agreed with the inspector general's conclusions and said it has made improvements since the report's findings were released privately to the agency in May.
US suspends vast ADVISE data-sifting system From late 2004 until mid-2006, a little-known data-mining computer system developed by the US Department of Homeland Security to hunt terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and biological weapons sifted through Americans' personal data with little regard for federal privacy laws. Now the $42 million cutting-edge system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS's own internal watchdog. Data mining to help fight the war on terror has become an accepted, even mandated, method to provide timely security information. The DHS operates at least a dozen such programs; intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense employ many others. But ADVISE (Analy­sis, Dissemina­tion, Visu­ali­zation, Insight and Semantic Enhance­ment) was special. An electronic omnivore conceived in 2003, it was designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources, government documents and researchers say....
Border checks limited to speed traffic By Sara A. Carter - U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Texas have been ordered to abbreviate national security checks at one of the nation"s busiest ports of entry to speed up travel between the United States and Mexico, according to official documents and multiple interviews with agents. An Aug. 16 memorandum from CBP El Paso field office Director Luis Garcia directs agents to limit inspections of vehicle and pedestrian border crossers as wait times escalate. The document, obtained by The Washington Times, sets new guidelines that border inspectors say undermine efforts to prevent terrorists and other criminals from entering the United States. Officers, who speculated the guidelines were created to counter complaints from businesses in the region that are angry over delays at the border, said pedestrian crossings are even more vulnerable. According to the memo, if the pedestrian crossing wait is more than one hour, "query at a rate of 30 percent of pedestrian traffic." El Paso is one of the world's busiest ports of entry. According to the CBP, nearly 40,000 cars went through the ports of entry at El Paso, Santa Teresa and Fabens daily in July. More than 145,000 pedestrians crossed into the United States during that period....
ICE reassigns agents to customs Immigration and Customs Enforcement criminal investigators will no longer be involved in immigration work site enforcement or conduct checks for illegal alien prisoners. Almost 1,000 ICE Office of Investigations agents will be reassigned exclusively to customs investigations, reducing the manpower involved in detention and removal of illegal aliens to 4,000 nationwide, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times and interviews with ICE union representatives. ICE officials refused to comment on the internal documents or clarify the number of investigators that are to be reassigned. The Washington Times has obtained an internal August memorandum written by ICE Office of Investigations Director Marcy Forman and Director John P. Torres, with Detention and Removal Operations (DRO), listing the new protocols for the agency. Prior to the memorandum, the Office of Investigations worked hand in hand with Detention and Removal agents to remove and deport illegal alien absconders....