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Lawmakers Want FBI Access to Data Curbed Bipartisan groups in Congress are pressing to place new controls on the FBI's ability to demand troves of sensitive personal information from telephone providers and credit card companies, over the opposition of agency officials who say they deserve more time to clean up past abuses. Proposals to rein in the use of secret "national security letters" will be discussed over the next week at hearings in both chambers. The hearings stem from disclosures that the FBI had clandestinely gathered telephone, e-mail and financial records "sought for" or "relevant to" terrorism or intelligence activities without following appropriate procedures. The Justice Department's inspector general issued reports in 2007 and earlier this year citing repeated breaches. They included shoddy FBI paperwork, improper claims about nonexistent emergencies and an insufficient link between the data requests and ongoing national security probes. The House bill, sponsored by Nadler, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), would tighten the language governing when national security letters could be used, by requiring that they clearly pertain to investigations of a foreign power or an agent instead of just being considered "relevant" to such investigations. The House bill would also force the FBI to destroy information that had been illegally obtained -- something that existing rules do not require -- and it would allow the recipient of a letter to file a civil lawsuit if the missive is found to be illegal or without sufficient factual justification. A Senate bill, sponsored by Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and John E. Sununu (R-N.H.), would require the FBI to track its use of the letters more carefully and would narrow the types of records that can be obtained with a letter, and therefore without judicial approval, to those that are least sensitive....
Documents undermine FBI defense of 'National Security Letters' The use of National Security Letters by the Bush Administration has long been controversial -- allowing the Justice Department and the FBI to demand financial and telephone records, e-mails and conduct surveillance without the supervision of a court. The FBI says these letters are critical to law enforcement, because it allows the agency to act in a more timely manner with regard to terrorist suspects than waiting for a court-issued warrant. But new documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, seem to upend that claim. In the report, EFF used documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request coupled with public information to detail the bizarre turns in the FBI's investigation of a former North Carolina State University student. Over the span of three days in July of 2005, FBI documents show that the bureau first obtained the educational records of the suspect with a grand jury subpoena. However, at the direction of FBI headquarters, agents returned the records and then requested them again through an improper NSL. As expanded by the PATRIOT Act, the FBI can use NSLs to get private records about anyone's domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions without any court approval -- as long as it claims the information could be relevant to a terrorism or espionage investigation. However, NSL authority does not allow the government to seek educational records, and the university refused the request. The FBI finally obtained the documents again through a second grand jury subpoena. Later in July of 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller used the delay in gathering the records as an example of why the FBI needed administrative subpoena power instead of NSLs so investigations could move faster....
FBI Search Abuses Could Number Thousands The FBI may have committed as many as 6,400 intelligence violations in the course of its use of national security letters, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine told lawmakers Tuesday. Fine also described his office's oversight since it disclosed last year that the FBI had issued more than 140,000 national security letters from 2003 to 2005. Last month, Fine released a follow-up report, which found that the FBI had issued 49,425 national security letters in 2006 alone. The inspector general's reviews prompted the FBI and Justice Department's National Security Division to begin internal audits of how NSLs are used. Under federal law, all intelligence agencies are required to self-report possible violations of the law to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board. A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the FBI previously disclosed documents that show the FBI overcollected data from entire e-mail servers instead of only the intended suspects' communications....
Democrats blast Mukasey for 9/11 call remarks Attorney General Michael Mukasey's assertion that an unmonitored terrorist phone call before the Sept. 11 attacks showed the need for more government wiretapping authority drew a scathing retort Monday from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, who accused him of rewriting history and ducking questions. In a written response to questions from Judiciary Committee leaders, who said such a phone call had never come up in post-Sept. 11 investigations, Mukasey said Thursday that the call hadn't come from Afghanistan, but from another nation he declined to name. But he said the incident still showed that Congress was interfering with efforts to monitor terrorist communications, with catastrophic results. On Monday, committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and two Democratic colleagues issued a statement saying they wanted "answers, not public relations spin." In an accompanying letter to Mukasey, they said the phone call he now appears to be describing was reviewed in 2003 by congressional intelligence committees, which found that the National Security Agency had intercepted the message but failed to relay it to other intelligence agencies. "The failure to utilize the information in this call had nothing to do with limitations in (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), contrary to what your March 27 speech appeared to suggest," the House members said. "Instead, the problem was NSA's narrow interpretation of its authority," a policy that the agency later changed on its own. They also said Mukasey's letter did not answer one of their central questions: whether U.S. intelligence agencies could have monitored the phone call under a provision in the surveillance law that allowed wiretapping without a warrant for up to 48 hours in an emergency. That period has since been increased to 72 hours....
REAL ID side effects If I were a betting man, I would wager most people haven't followed the debate on REAL ID. If you indeed missed it, I would ask you take the time to learn about what I consider the most troubling piece of legislation I've seen come from Washington since I have been governor. REAL ID would surreptitiously require all 50 states to change their driver's licenses to act as de-facto national ID cards. It's outrageous, and not just because it was a backdoor way of doing something proponents in Washington have never been able to pull off in the past. I say "outrageous" because REAL ID was never really debated in Congress; because the cost of its implementation is handed down to states and individuals; and because it is an affront to Americans' privacy concerns. Let's look more closely at a few of those concerns: (1) Steroid use in baseball has now received more congressional attention than has REAL ID. But national policy changes should be debated, not dictated. This was not the case with REAL ID. It never saw committee debate in the House or Senate, and passed as nothing more than a rider, an attachment, to a bill devoted to tsunami relief and military personnel fighting in the Middle East. (2) The cost of REAL ID, and the national ID card system that would come with it, would not be borne by the federal government but handed to the states and individuals. So-called unfunded mandates like these keep the spending trains going in Washington. I find it amazing now that Washington has stacked up $50 trillion in debts, which amount to $450,000 per household, that their idea of keeping those promises rests on handing the bill to others....
Border Patrol targets ex-military as agents The Border Patrol, scrambling to hire thousands of agents by the end of the year, is taking its recruiting efforts overseas to try to enlist military veterans who have fulfilled their tours of duty. Two teams of agency officers just returned from visiting six U.S. military bases in Germany, where they persuaded nearly 100 veterans to apply to join the Homeland Security Department as border agents. "This is a premier law enforcement agency, and we offer an opportunity for service on the front lines of the country," said Joe Arata, a recruiter for Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division, which includes the Border Patrol. CBP spokeswoman Tara Dunlop said the department plans to do more recruiting overseas. The Homeland Security Department has been trying to drastically increase the number of agents along the nation's open borders. The recruiting drive also comes at a time when law enforcement agencies nationwide, from city and state police departments to the FBI, are competing for hires. In 2001, the Border Patrol had fewer than 10,000 agents covering the northern and southern borders with Canada and Mexico. A buildup in recent years has brought the ranks to 15,500. President Bush has said he wants the size of the agency doubled, to 20,000 agents, by the time he leaves office next January....
In Mexico, War on Drug Cartels Takes Wider Toll Ramírez's ordeal occurred during one of the most volatile moments in Mexico's military campaign against drug cartels, a war that has ranged from the U.S.-Mexican border to Gulf ports to insular rural outposts such as this, and that pits the country's demand for security against its stated commitment to human rights. A village of 3,000 mostly small-plot farmers, Nocupetaro is among a constellation of communities where the military has been dispatched to take on the cartels in one of the largest domestic deployments in Mexican history. President Felipe Calderón has sent more than 25,000 soldiers and federal police across the country over the past 16 months in response to drug-related violence that has killed more than 5,300 people since 2006. According to government figures, major army operations in nine states have led to more than 22,000 arrests and the seizure of 50 tons of cocaine and 40,000 weapons. The operations, government officials say, have shaved $9 billion a year from the cartel's roughly $23 billion drug trade. In an anti-narcotics plan now before Congress, President Bush has proposed sending the Mexican military $205.5 million in equipment in 2008, more than 40 percent of the proposed outlay for the year. The Merida Initiative, as the program is known, designates a portion of Mexico's proposed $950 million package for 2008 and 2009 for human rights training for police, prosecutors and prison officials, though none for the army....
Wal-Mart to film gun sales in bid to fight crime Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world's largest retailer, unveiled plans on Monday to film its gun sales in the United States and create a computerized log of purchases in a bid to stop guns falling into the wrong hands. Wal-Mart, which is the largest seller of firearms in the United States, agreed a 10-point code, which also includes rigid inventory controls, with a bipartisan coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns led by New York's Michael Bloomberg. The retailer said it will develop a first-of-its-kind computerized crime gun trace log that will flag purchases by customers who have previously bought guns later recovered in crimes. "Wal-Mart currently uses a strong point of sale system," said J.P. Suarez, senior vice president and chief compliance officer of Wal-Mart. "This code is a way for us to fine-tune the things we're already doing and further strengthen our standards. We hope other retailers will join us." The Responsible Firearms Retailer Partnership is designed to strengthen the points in the gun purchasing system that criminals have exploited in the past, Wal-Mart and the Mayors Against Illegal Guns said....
Feds to collect DNA from every person they arrest The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency — a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people. Using authority granted by Congress, the government also plans to collect DNA samples from foreigners who are detained, whether they have been charged or not. The DNA would be collected through a cheek swab, Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said Wednesday. That would be a departure from current practice, which limits DNA collection to convicted felons. Expanding the DNA database, known as CODIS, raises civil liberties questions about the potential for misuse of such personal information, such as family ties and genetic conditions. Ablin said the DNA collection would be subject to the same privacy laws applied to current DNA sampling. That means none of it would be used for identifying genetic traits, diseases or disorders. Congress gave the Justice Department the authority to expand DNA collection in two different laws passed in 2005 and 2006. There are dozens of federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the Library of Congress Police. The federal government estimates it makes about 140,000 arrests each year. Justice officials estimate the new collecting requirements would add DNA from an additional 1.2 million people to the database each year....
States expand taking of DNA States are dramatically expanding controversial DNA sampling beyond convicted felons to include tens of thousands of suspects arrested on felony charges before they are tried. Twelve states have laws that permit sampling for some or all felony arrests, up from five in 2006, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) says. Another 21 are considering such proposals, according to DNAResource.com, which tracks DNA-related laws. Provisions in most of the new laws call for destroying samples if suspects are acquitted or charges are dropped. After a sample is destroyed, the DNA cannot be matched to other crimes in the database. The fast-growing legislation, once applied narrowly to sex offenders and convicted felons, worries civil liberties advocates who believe the testing amounts to a clumsy forensic dragnet. "In our system, you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty," says Maryland state Sen. Lisa Gladden, a Democrat, who opposed a DNA sampling plan offered by Gov. Martin O'Malley, also a Democrat. Despite such objections, the technique is gaining popularity as a law-enforcement tool. The expansion "is definitely picking up steam," says Donna Lyons, criminal justice director at NCSL....