FBI Illegally Obtained 2,000-Plus Phone Records; Lawyer Raised Concerns
The FBI illegally obtained more than 2,000 telephone call records by invoking terrorism emergencies that weren’t real or by persuading telecommunications companies to cooperate, a newspaper investigation has found.
The illegal requests were made between 2002 and 2006, the Washington Post reports. FBI director Robert Mueller did not know about the problems until late 2006 or early 2007, after the Justice Department’s inspector general began an investigation, FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told the newspaper.
Among those whose records were illegally searched were reporters for the Washington Post and the New York Times, the story says. One FBI lawyer, Patrice Kopistansky, wrote a series of e-mails in early 2005 asking her superiors to address the problem, but the improper requests continued for two more years, the story says.
“We have to make sure we are not taking advantage of this system, and that we are following the letter of the law without jeopardizing national security,” Kopistansky wrote in one e-mail.
FBI officials often approved the actions after the fact in an effort to put phone carriers at ease, Caproni told the Post. She said that falsely citing an emergency amounts to a technical violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
