F.B.I. Data Mining Reached Beyond Target Suspects

The National Security Letters to telecommunications companies whose use by the FBI were struck down this week, reached out and touched a lot more people than just the original suspects according to NY Times report (same title as above):

In a percentage of the letters the G men threw in boilerplate requests for the companies to siphon up the info on a target's "community of interest".   I note with concern that the 'target' isn't even called a suspect.  They didn't even need to have that much evidence that a person was some kind of terrorist or whatever to vacuum up data on anyone he or she had called.

  See my post: Judge Blocks Warrantless Collection of Email and phone data by FBI through "national security letters"

This small excerpt seems to mirror what I was thinking about "targets":

In many cases, the target of a national security letter whose records are being sought is not necessarily the actual subject of a terrorism investigation and may not be suspected at all.

Another point easily missed is that the national security letters sent to telecommunication companies were often lists of numbers to track and provide data on the community of interest. 

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 nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it brought against the government. The F.B.I. recently turned over 2,500 pages of documents to the group. The boilerplate language suggests 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 had never been authorized by law.

The bureau declined to discuss any aspect 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 F.B.I.’s use of the letters, but did not mention the use of community of interest data.

Entire article is important to read. 

tags: national security letters  fbi  privacy advocates  

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