The FBI cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it previously has acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone calls of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.
The documents indicate that the FBI used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on people it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with. The bureau recently stopped the practice in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said Friday after being asked about it.
The community-of-interest data sought by the FBI is central to a data-mining technique that intelligence officials call link analysis. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. counterterrorism officials have turned more frequently to the technique, using communications patterns and other data to identify suspects who may not have any other known links to extremists.
Drawn into vacuum
The concept has strong government proponents who see it as a vital tool in predicting and preventing attacks. It also is thought to have helped the National Security Agency identify targets for its domestic eavesdropping program. But privacy advocates, civil rights leaders and some counterterrorism officials warn that link analysis can be misused to establish tenuous links to people who have no real connection to terrorism.
Typically, community-of-interest data might include an analysis of which people the targets called most frequently, how long they generally talked and at what times of day, sudden fluctuations in activity, geographic regions that were called and other data, law-enforcement and industry officials said.
The FBI declined to say exactly what data had been turned over. It was limited to people and phone numbers “once removed” from the actual target of the national security letters, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a continuing review by the Justice Department.
Mike Kortan, a spokesman for the FBI, said in a statement Saturday, in response to this article as posted on the Web site of The New York Times, that “it is important to emphasize that it [the practice] is no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy, was used infrequently, and was never used for e-mail communications.”
The scope of the demands for information could be seen in an August 2005 letter seeking the call records for particular phone numbers that had come under suspicion. The letter closed by saying: “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.”
The requests for such data showed up a dozen times, using nearly identical language, in records from one six-month period in 2005 obtained by a non-profit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The FBI recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group.
The boilerplate language suggests that the requests may have been used in many of more than 700 emergency or “exigent” national security letters. Earlier this year, the bureau banned the use of the exigent letters because they never had been authorized by law.
The bureau declined to discuss specific aspects of the community-of-interest requests because it said the issue was part of an investigation by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into national security letters. An initial review in March by the inspector general found widespread violations and possible illegality in the FBI’s use of the letters but did not mention the use of community-of-interest data.
An excess of power feared
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Some legal analysts and privacy advocates suggested that the disclosure of the FBI’s collection of community-of-interest records offered another example of the bureau exceeding the substantial powers granted it by Congress.
“This whole concept of tracking someone’s community of interest is not part of any established FBI authority,” said Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which provided the records from its lawsuit to The New York Times. “It’s being defined by the FBI. And when it’s left up to the FBI to decide what information is relevant to their investigations, they can vacuum up almost anything they want.”
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Assailing the law
The parts of the USA Patriot Act that had authorized the FBI’s use of “national security letters” were struck down last week by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York. He said some provisions violated the 1st Amendment and the constitutional separation of powers guarantee.