Legal News

How?d the FBI Get Your Phone Records? Here?s One Possibility

By Ashby Jones

The lead to this Thursday NYT article struck us as a bit chilling. It reads:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly obtained calling records for more than 3,500 telephone accounts from 2003 to 2006 without following any legal procedures, according to a newly disclosed report by the Justice Department's inspector general.

Strange. So how’d the FBI get the calling records? According to the IG’s report (click here for all 289 pages of it), the agents simply asked for the records from telephone company employees. And voila, the records were provided. Click here for the WaPo article.

Moreover, reports the NYT, the report found that the FBI improperly landed large numbers of calling records without determining whether they were relevant to an investigation. And in an number of instances, the bureau made inaccurate statements to a court that authorizes national security wiretaps about how it had obtained calling records, the report said.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said: “This was not a matter of technical violations. If one of us did something like this, we’d have to answer for it. This was authorized at high levels within the FBI and continued for years.”

In a statement released Wednesday, the FBI said that it had "acknowledged repeatedly" that it "did not have in place adequate internal controls to ensure that appropriate process was used and that appropriate records were kept."

The FBI has dropped its use of exigent letters and instituted a stronger set of record-keeping requirements. It has also stopped having phone company employees working in the same place as FBI agents, the report said.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).