An internal audit found the FBI broke the law thousands of times when requesting Americans’ phone records using fake emergency letters that were never followed up on with true subpoenas — even though top officials knew the practice was illegal, according to The Washington Post.

The inspector general’s follow-up report on the so-called “exigent” letters — an investigation that started in 2007 — is due in a few months. E-mails obtained by the Post showed that responsible agency officials informed superiors in 2005, but the practice continued for two more years.

While it looks as if the nation’s top law enforcement agency routinely violated the nation’s wiretapping laws for years, it seems no one will actually be prosecuted since the violations are being judged as merely “technical.”

Agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s terrorism investigation unit in New York City began using so-called “exigent letters” shortly after 9/11 as a shortcut around a proper terrorism subpoena, known as a National Security Letter. A proper NSL authorized under the Patriot Act allows agents to secretly get an individuals’ phone and financial records with a self-issued subpoena so long as they are “relevant” to an official, ongoing investigation.

That was supposed to prevent FBI agents from getting someone’s phone number just for exercising their First Amendment rights. But the standard was low enough that agents began issuing tens of thousands of NSLs a year, with not one being checked by a judge.

But even those rules were too stringent, and the New York-style “exigent letter” — an understandable shortcut after the 9/11 attacks — graduated from being temporary and was adopted by employees in Washington, D.C.

The news comes as Congress contemplates tightening the safeguards around NSLs following what has become an ever-growing list of abuses of FBI powers.

Even though supervisors and legal counsel became of aware of the fake emergency letters in 2004, the illegal behavior continued. But the phone companies began pushing back against the requests because they were being left with the legal liability. The public became aware of the NSL abuse in 2007, when the Justice Department’s inspector general released a report on the use of the power.

Documents show that senior FBI managers up to the assistant director level approved the procedures for emergency requests of phone records and that headquarters officials often made the requests, which persisted for two years after bureau lawyers raised concerns and an FBI official began pressing for changes.

“We have to make sure we are not taking advantage of this system, and that we are following the letter of the law without jeopardizing national security,” FBI lawyer Patrice Kopistansky wrote in one of a series of early 2005 e-mails asking superiors to address the problem.

The FBI acknowledged in 2007 that one unit in the agency had improperly gathered some phone records, and a Justice Department audit at the time cited 22 inappropriate requests to phone companies for searches and hundreds of questionable requests. But the latest revelations show that the improper requests were much more numerous under the procedures approved by the top level of the FBI.

In fact, the real number is 2,200 illegal requests out of a total of 4,400 so-called exigent requests, the Post reports.

When FBI personnel attempted to provide NSLs to cover the requests after the fact, they often couldn’t because the requests came from higher-up personnel and there was often no open-case to tie the request to. Department guidelines require NSLs to be tied to specific cases. Agents finally created blanket NSLs that covered multiple requests — one NSL was for threats to aviation, another was for threats to individuals.

Then the FBI decided just to issue on NSL to cover all that was left, the Post reports.

“What is new in the Post’s reporting today is that it was FBI supervisors and senior officials who were abusing the system,” said Greg Nojeim, a lawyer at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“The FBI has been assuring us for years that the abuses of the Patriot Act could be cured by more layers of internal review, but now we learn that the supervisors themselves were abusing the process,” Nojeim said. “When people are under pressure, internal review is not enough, there needs to be external oversight, and the best way to do that is to have a judge look at the situation.”

According to a graduate student’s research into the spying policies of major U.S. telecommunications companies, at a recent security conference a Sprint surveillance manager told a group of onlookers that half of all police requests include the target’s text messages.

Half of millions — including some 8 million automated, web-based requests for GPS location, all in just over a year’s time.

The revelation was made by Indiana University grad Christopher Soghoian, as part of his PhD dissertation published Dec. 1, 2009.

He attributes the stunning number to Paul Taylor, an Electronic Surveillance Manager with Sprint Nextel, who was speaking recently at the Washington, D.C. International Securities Systems conference, otherwise known as ISS World.

“Looking around at the name badges pinned to the suits milling around the refreshment area, it really was a who’s who of the spies and those who enable their spying,” he wrote. “Household name telecom companies and equipment vendors, US government agencies (both law enforcement and intel). Also present were representatives from foreign governments — Columbia, Mexico, Algeria, and Nigeria, who, like many of the US government employees, spent quite a bit of time at the vendor booths, picking up free pens and coffee mugs while they learned about the latest and greatest surveillance products currently on the market.”

According to Soghoian, it was during the telecom service providers roundtable discussion that Taylor dropped the bombs.

“[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface,” he said in an audio recording that has since been removed due to alleged copyright violation. “One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement.”

“He’s talking about the wonderful automated backend Sprint runs for law enforcement, LSite, which allows investigators to rapidly retrieve information directly, without the burden of having to get a human being to respond to every specific request for data,” added Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute. “Rather, says Sprint, each of those 8 million requests represents a time when an FBI computer or agent pulled up a target’s location data using their portal or API. (I don’t think you can Tweet subpoenas yet.) For an investigation whose targets are under ongoing realtime surveillance over a period of weeks or months, that could very well add up to hundreds or thousands of requests for a few individuals. So those 8 million data requests, according to a Sprint representative in the comments, actually ‘only’ represent ‘several thousand’ discrete cases.”

Taylor continued: “Two or three years ago, we probably had less than 10% of our requests including text messaging. Now, over half of all of our surveillance includes SMS messaging.”

He added that his team, which handles all of Sprint’s police requests, is 110 people strong.

“It’s useful to keep in mind that, as Sprint spokesman Matt Sullivan [said], ‘every wireless carrier has a team and a system’ through which police can access GPS data,” noted a follow-up report by Talking Points Memo. “Sprint is the company unlucky enough to find itself the focus of scrutiny, but it reportedly controls just 18% of the U.S. wireless market, making it the third largest carrier.”

GPS location “likely outnumber[s] all other forms of surveillance request,” Soghoian added.

Sprint has over 47 million customers in the U.S.

Distributors for new software that allows parents to spy on their children’s text messages say they are still hopeful, as they try to get approval for their product.

The software, which allows parents to see every text message their child sends and receives, was due to be on sale in August, but the earliest it will now be available is early next year.

Civil libertarians and technology experts have deep concerns about the privacy implications of the product.

Device Connections is the Australian agent for the US software and its managing director, Geoff Sondergeld, says that since its introduction in America it has caught a number of paedophiles.

‘It’s been very successful in both a law enforcement point of view as well as a consumer point of view,” he said.

“Since March 2008, which was the initial trial, using the product the guys in the US have convicted 171 paedophiles.”

Mr Sondergeld held talks yesterday with Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and said the Minister was enthusiastic about the product.

“Cyber safety and the overall cyber safety plan that the Federal Government has is obviously a key component of Mr Conroy’s portfolio,” he said.

New South Wales Nationals Senator John Williams is also a supporter of the software, called My Mobile Watchdog.

“I’m a dad of three – my children have grown up, the oldest is 20 years old – but we want the best for our children,” he said.

“We don’t want people out in our society that are not going to be good for our children, people who are going to send them pictures or emails or access to pornography.

“We don’t want our kids being subject to that and when parents are paying the phone bill for the minor, they have a right to lay down the rules.”

Legal concerns

Mr Sondergeld says his company is ensuring the software does not impinge on any communications or privacy laws.

“All the parties involved are fully aware that the product is being monitored, so the child receives an alert every 24 hours to say that the phone is being monitored,” he said.

“In terms of the Privacy Act and and the Telecommunications Act, we’ve held discussions with the Privacy Commission as well as the Attorney-General’s department so they’re fully aware of the product and their applicability to those pieces of legislation.”

He says that while nothing is confirmed yet, he anticipates that the product will be available in Australia by early next year.

But Geordie Guy from Electronic Frontiers Australia has told ABC Radio’s PM program that the software may contravene current Australian law.

“We have in Australia the Telecommunications Interception Amendment Act, which basically points out that this is wire-tapping,” he said.

“While it’s difficult to imagine that the police would take a complaint from a 12-year-old child seriously, if they rang up and said ‘you need to do something about my parents tapping my phone’ the act is quite clear that that is what it is, it’s section 7 of the Act.”

Mr Guy says both parents and the software distribution company could be considered in breach of the law.

“Theoretically it would be up to a judge, but the parents would be at risk of breaking the law.

“Also the company which sells the devices may find that they are in breach of section 7C of the Act, which makes it an offence to enable someone to wire tap without a warrant.”

The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.’
Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun’s national security correspondent, David Wood: “The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.”

In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.

The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: “The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.”

This gives the word “dragnet” an especially chilling new meaning.

The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer, director of its National Security Project, adds that the new statute, warming the cold hearts of the NSA, “implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind.”

Why did Obama vote for this eye-that-never-blinks? He’s a bright, informed guy, but he wasn’t yet the President-Elect. The cool pragmatist wanted to indicate he wasn’t radically unmindful of national security—and that his previous vow to filibuster such a bill may have been a lapse in judgment. It was.

What particularly outraged civil libertarians across the political divide was that the FISA Amendments Act gave immunity to the telecommunications corporations—which, for seven years, have been a vital part of the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program—thereby dismissing the many court cases brought by citizens suing those companies for violating their individual constitutional liberties. This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.

That’s OK with the Obama administration? Please tell us, Mr. President.

Some of us began to see how deeply and intricately the telecoms were involved in the NSA’s spying when—as part of an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit—it was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that he had found a secret AT&T room in which the NSA was tapping into the telecom giant’s fiber-optic cables. On National Public Radio on November 7, 2007, he disclosed: “It’s not just AT&T’s traffic going through these cables, because these cables connected AT&T’s network with other networks like Sprint, Qwest [the one firm that refused to play ball with the government], Global Crossing, UUNet, etc.”
… Continue Reading

Americans inclined to have phone sex on international calls may have an unintendedmenage a trois instead.  ABC spoke to two former NSA operatives on the record about their work in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and let’s just say that they weren’t completely focused on the task at hand.  Instead of the narrow surveillance promised by the Bush administration, the NSA in practice likes to keep themselves amused:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

Another Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, worked at NSA from 2003 to late 2007, and told ABC essentially the same thing.  They saved conversations that amused them, often getting other operators to listen to phone sex, pillow talk, and other salacious tidbits. They also eavesdropped on journalists and aid workers, even after the NSA knew the numbers had nothing to do with terrorism.

They also intercepted critical information that saved lives in Iraq and elsewhere.  Faulk talked about discovering IEDs that got dismantled because of NSA intercepts, actions that saved the lives of American troops targeted by terrorists.  However, both Faulk and Kinne expressed frustration that the refusal of the NSA to winnow out numbers that clearly would produce no actionable intelligence made it harder for them to find the needles in the haystacks.  “By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody,” Kinne told ABC.  “You’re actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.”

Americans have trusted the NSA to act professionally in its pursuit of terrorists, and to use its limited resources wisely.  We have heard for the last seven years about the shortage of qualified Arab linguists in the American intelligence community.  If these two are telling the truth, it’s not only a breach of that necessary trust in defending Americans from the asymmetrical threat of terrorists, it’s a criminal misuse of that limited resource.

We need a strong and focused effort from the NSA to discover terrorist plots before they have a chance to reach fruition in their goals of killing Americans.  If these accounts can be independently corroborated, then current management doesn’t appear up to the task.

Update: One commenter says, “Ed, you make a good point, but wouldn’t you possibly be tempted to listen in on a few phone sex calls after listening to thousands of hours of boring garbage?”  In my former career in commercial security, other companies in our field made extensive use of microphones in both residential and commercial applications, which can help cut down false alarms.  They can also provide endless hours of amusement for alarm company operators, especially the residential installations (if you get my drift), who don’t mind telling these stories to pass the time at their new jobs.  Believe me, I understand the impulse, although thankfully I’ve never been in that position myself.

That was why I understood the point of the NSA’s critics on the TSP.  A program like this requires strict supervision to keep abuses from happening.  If what ABC reports is correct, it doesn’t look like we’re getting it.

Update II:  Hmm.  It looks like ABC didn’t do enough research on one of its sources.  Adrienne Kinne is also on the board of directors of Iraq Veterans Against the War, a fact ABC doesn’t mention in its piece.  Faulk now works for the Metro Spirit as a reporter and doesn’t appear to have joined any organized political opposition to the war, but has spoken out against it.

Does that make them not credible?  Not necessarily, especially with Faulk.  They may have come to oppose the war based on these very experiences.  However, ABC certainly should have told its readers and viewers about Kinne’s association with IVAW.

Update III: Just to remind readers, the Bush administration claimed the TSP would only surveil without search warrants calls from phone numbers that had been previously implicated in terrorist activities.  They claimed they would get warrants, as provided by FISA, for all other calls with at least one destination point within the US.  If they’re recording calls outside of those parameters, they’re explicitly violating the law and breaking that promise.

Update IV: Conn Carroll reminds me that satellite phones are not covered under the FISA law and the NSA can listen to any and all conversations on them without warrants.  ABC didn’t bother to mention that either.  Still, is this really what the NSA should be doing?  If the satellite phone number belongs to an Army officer instead of a terrorist, why are we wasting resources on surveilling it?
Source: Hotair

Plans for a massive expansion of ‘Big Brother’ state surveillance to cover every phone call, email, text message and internet visit in Britain were unveiled yesterday.

UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claimed
that storing details of individuals’ communications was vital to prevent further terrorist atrocities.

Activities which will be subject to snooping for the first time include visits
to social networking sites such as Facebook, auction sites such as eBay, gaming websites and chatrooms.

Police and security services will not be
able to access the precise content but will know each site visited, and to whom and when a phone call, text message or email was sent.

If this sets alarm bells ringing, they could seek a Ministerial warrant to intercept exactly what is being sent, including the content.

The billions of pieces of data are likely
to be stored for a year or more. The cost
is estimated to be at least £1billion, and
could be far higher.

Last night MPs and privacy groups attacked the proposals as ‘Stalinist’, ‘Orwellian’ and a reversal of the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty.

One opponent said: ‘They are making us all suspects.’

A leaked memo written by sources close to the project revealed it was fraught with technical difficulties.

Officials are split between placing the vast amount of data to be collected on a huge central Government database or forcing service providers to store the information,
to be accessed on demand.

Currently, the option being worked on is to request data from the service providers, the memo reveals. They are likely to pass on extra costs to customers.

Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve said: ‘These proposals would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain personal information on individuals.

‘Given the Government’s poor record on protecting data and running databases there
needs to be a full and proper debate.

‘The public will also be acutely aware of how, under this Government, surveillance powers designed to combat terrorism and serious organised crime have been used by local authorities to investigate things like fly-tipping. This would be absolutely unacceptable.’

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: ‘The Government’s Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying.

‘Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets where anti-terrorism law has been
used for purposes for which it was not intended.

‘These proposals are incompatible with a free country and a free people.’

We’re watching you: An East German Stasi officer listens in on a couple in a scene from the Oscar-winning film The Lives Of Others. Jacqui Smith has unveiled plans for a massive expansion of state surveillance
Phil Booth, of the NO2ID privacy campaign, said: ‘This is the Stalinist vision which we always knew was on the agenda. Monitoring the entire population is a complete abhorrence, reversing the presumption of innocent until proven guilty and making us all suspects.’

But senior security and police services were adamant that, without the new powers, lives would be put at risk.

They said some investigations have already been affected by criminals who use technology to avoid detection, by plotting online through social networking sites or
interactive games.

‘Criminals are getting more sophisticated in using this technology and they are going to exploit it unless we do something,’ one source said.

Miss Smith yesterday admitted the public had reason to be concerned.

In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank, she said: ‘Of course, even if there had not been events [data losses], the British public would have every right to be sceptical about a state activity that involves the collection of data.’

But she said that, without increasing their capacity to store data, the police and security services would have to consider a ‘massive expansion of surveillance’.

And she insisted: ‘There are no plans for an enormous database which will contain the content of your emails, the texts that you send or the chats you have on the
phone or online.

‘Nor are we going to give local authorities the power to trawl through the database in the interests of investigating lower level criminality under the spurious cover
of counter-terrorist legislation.’
Source: Dailymail

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