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Wired: FBI Office May Link to NSA Surveillance
Wired's Ryan Singel has a great find in his review of FBI Director Robert Mueller's March 2004 notes on the warrantless-surveillance imbroglio. One of the aides Mueller met with the day Acting Attorney General James Comey likely informed him that he wouldn't reauthorize the surveillance program is Michael A. Fedarcyk, then the chief of the Counterterrorism Division's Communications Exploitation Section. That meeting may shine a light into how information generated from the National Security Agency's surveillance of international communications made its way into domestic terrorism investigations.
The Communications Exploitation Section is where FBI counterterrorism analysts sift through communications of suspected terrorists to determine patterns of communication within the U.S. to discover hidden networks. Singel notes that Fedarcyk's presence at the March 9, 2004 morning meeting with Mueller indicates that his office was involved, somehow, in the NSA surveillance effort: "perhaps only as a receiver of leads from the NSA -- perhaps as a partner in the government's alleged data-mining of U.S. citizens phone and internet usage records."
Given how "strict compartmentalization rules" from the White House limited officials' knowledge of the surveillance program, it's unclear what Fedarcyk would have known about the legal basis for a program that his office may have been connected to. But a subsection of that office, known as the Communications Analysis Unit, was found by the Justice Department's Inspector General to have improperly sent at least 739 so called "exigent letters" -- emergency demands for records -- to phone companies in non-emergency cases between 2003 and 2005, amounting to requests for information on over 3,000 phone numbers. The urgency might, perhaps, be explained by tips generated from the NSA surveillance effort into potential terrorists operating in the United States.
Singel reported exclusively last month that the FBI and the DOJ inspector general's office have a joint investigation open into the Communications Analysis Unit -- possibly a criminal one -- as the unit doesn't itself have the authority to issue an exigent letter.
Comments (13)
M M wrote on August 17, 2007 12:36 PM:I was curious why Mueller had so much clout during this whole exercise. It's doubtful they could use anything they learned from these data mining/tagging/wiretapping for law enforcement purposes. What's the saying about the poisoned trees and fruit?
Phoenix Rising wrote on August 17, 2007 1:00 PM:As a computer security kinda guy, this whole exercise in investigation is spellbinding. The use of compartmentalization is meant to keep even those involved from knowing just how everything works. Aggregation - the collection of these disparate parts of data - is the counter to compartmentalization, and it's fascinating to see the investigative work aggregating all these little pieces into the coherent whole that the Administration has been trying to hide.
Bob's not Right wrote on August 17, 2007 1:41 PM:In March of 2003 the White House released an amended Executive Order 12958. This EO was originally drafted by Clinton and released in April of 1997. The EO is titled “Classified National Security Information.” It is long and mostly boiler plate and basically describes the definitions and authorities of classified information.
I was curious what the amendments were so I pulled both copies and started to read them side by side with a highlighter, most of the changes are pretty subtle however one change that kind of stuck out was the following:
In the original EO it stated that the originating classification authority for “Top Secret” was 1. The President, 2. Agency heads and officials designated by the president in the federal register and 3. (Omitted for clarity, both are basically the same language for #3).
In the amended EO #1 reads; “The President and, in performance of executive duties, the Vice President. Numbers 2 and 3 are about the same. The VP is inserted in similar sections as well as language about “Transnational Terrorism” and “Homeland Security” that were not in the 1997 version.
I bring all this up in the context of what has been discussed here over the past few days of what the President released and who knew what and the parsing of the AG’s testimony.
The only reason that I can think of to specifically write the VP in the “original classification” section was to give him the authority to classify material that had NO trace back to the President.
I would be curious to get some additional insight.
lysias wrote on August 17, 2007 3:21 PM:How did the prosecutors get the information about the surveillance of Al Haramain? Was it through this FBI office? Or is there another office within DOJ that routes such information to prosecutors?
gman777 wrote on August 17, 2007 5:15 PM:I believe the justice department mistakenly sent Al Haramain's lawyers the top secret information of tthe surveiliance without realizing it.
foggylady wrote on August 17, 2007 8:32 PM:Bob's not Right....nicely done.
paul lukasiak wrote on August 18, 2007 8:59 AM:And reminds me of Sen. Whitehouse questioning Gonzo on why the VP had been included in DOJ investigative reporting.
I bet with a little peeking, and knowing what to look for ( which I don't) we may find VP written in on allsorts of stuff. Darth Cheney's role as head of shodow government is becoming more transparent over time.
I was curious why Mueller had so much clout during this whole exercise.
Mueller is critical to this whole thing because it is likely that Comey and Goldsmith were never read into the NSA program . Their knowledge of what was happening was derived from what the FBI was getting from the NSA, and the concerns that FBI personnel had about the information they were getting.
Those concerns were communicated to Mueller, who brought them to the attention of Comey/Goldsmith. Goldsmith's analysis of the NSA program was like not based on a full understanding of the program itself, but only an understanding of the information coming OUT of the program. Goldsmith doubtless understood that there was no way this information was being collected legally....
He explained that to Comey, Comey explained to Ashcroft that he'd been bamboozled....and Ashcroft wound up in the hospital before he had a chance to confront Gonzales et al.
(Gonzales, in 'clarifying' his testimony re the hospital visit, claimed that "prior to the time I departed [for the hospital], General Ashcroft briefly mentioned a concern about security clearances for members of his staff regarding the NSA activities that were the subject of the presidential order." In other words, right before he left for the hospital -- during the phone call (from Cheney?) that announced that Card and Gonzo were going to the hospital, Ashcroft communicated that he was pissed off about being bamboozled.)
J wrote on August 18, 2007 11:07 AM:Lets remember that Bolton was using NSA to spy on Colin Powel. (See UN confirmation runup, and story by Blumethal published in Guardian.)One part of the administration spying on another? wtf? What sort of ethics could possibly restrict such people from spying on journalists and democrats? The problem with all of this is the complete reliance on the ethics of the people doing it, of which apparently there is little or none.
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