FBI Illegally Collected Thousands of Phone Records Through Fake Terror Emergencies

By Jeralyn, Section War on Terror
Posted on Tue Jan 19, 2010 at 08:36:00 AM EST
Tags: warrantless electronic surveillance (all tags)

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The Washington Post has obtained FBI internal memos and e-mails showing that the FBI illegally collected thousands of phone records from 2002 to 2006 by lying to phone companies and inventing fake terror emergencies. From the memos, and through interviews, it has learned:

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

A Justice Department inspector general's report due out this month is expected to conclude that the FBI frequently violated the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

FBI General Counsel Valerie Peroni tells the Post the FBI violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Actby invoking non-existent emergencies to obtain the records. [More...]

"We should have stopped those requests from being made that way," she said. The after-the-fact approvals were a "good-hearted but not well-thought-out" solution to put phone carriers at ease, she said.

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.

Here's one of the emails raising concerns.

FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.

The FBI says safeguards instituted in 2007 ended the practice.