FBI told its cyber surveillance programs have actually not gone far enough In-house 9/11 Review Commission calls for further expansion of informant and cyber surveillance networks but largely ignores domestic intelligence gatheringAn in-house review of the FBI has found the agency failing to go far enough in its expansion of physical and cyber surveillance programs, urging the bureau to recruit deeper networks of informants and bring its technological abilities up to pace with other intelligence agencies.
While billed as a damning critique of the FBI, the in-house assessment known as the 9/11 Review Commission primarily attacks the bureau for not moving fast enough to become a domestic intelligence agency, precisely the direction in which the FBI has pivoted since the 2001 terror attacks.
The majority of the panel’s findings recommend bureaucratic changes – such as expanded training for FBI intelligence analysts or expanding cooperation with local and state law enforcement through the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force – or otherwise urge Director James Comey onward in the long-set course he and predecessor Robert Mueller have set, such as bolstering the FBI’s “human intelligence” (Humint) network of informants.
In particular, the report found that the agency fails to support analysts and linguists who interpret intelligence behind the scenes. The “imbalance” between support for field agents and analysts “needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates”, the report’s authors wrote.
Yet the “Review Commission cannot say that with better JTTF collaboration, Humint or even intelligence analysis that the FBI would have detected those plots beforehand”, the panel concedes, offering only that FBI counterterrorism “might have benefited” with an acceleration of what the agency has already been doing.
Much of the report remarked approvingly on the FBI’s activities of the past decade, praising the way it shares information with government agencies and the new rules that allow it to surveil a target without a warrant.
“With the new and almost entirely unclassified AG Guidelines, special agents working on national security issues could now at the assessment stage ‘recruit and task sources, engage in interviews of members of the public without a requirement to identify themselves as FBI agents and disclose the precise purpose of the interview, and engage in physical surveillance not requiring a court order’ just as special agents working on organized crime investigations could do,” the authors wrote.
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link to www.theguardian.com]
Last Edited by 411 on 03/29/2015 12:44 PM"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt