The Associated Press
Sunday 14 October 2007
New York - A review by the Pentagon of hundreds of secret letters it sent out after the Sept. 11 attacks seeking financial records of individuals found that the program lacked coordination and oversight, according to newly released documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained heavily edited copies of Pentagon documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, said an analysis of 455 "national security letters" issued after Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the Pentagon collaborated with the FBI to circumvent laws and may have overstepped its authority to obtain financial and credit records.
Recipients of national security letters, including Internet service providers, financial institutions and credit reporting agencies, are generally forbidden to disclose to the individuals under investigation that they have received letters requesting financial records.
"Once again, the Bush administration's unchecked authority has led to abuse and civil liberties violations," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement Sunday. "The documents make clear that the Department of Defense may have secretly and illegally conducted surveillance beyond the powers it was granted by Congress."
The Associated Press could not reach a spokesperson for the Pentagon on Sunday.
Spokesman Maj. Patrick Ryder defended the letters in an interview with The New York Times in Sunday's editions. Investigators could use the financial records, for example, to examine the assets of a military contractor who appeared to have sudden and unexplained wealth, he said.
The Times first disclosed the military's use of the letters in January, and members of Congress and civil liberties groups have said the practice conflicted with traditional Pentagon rules against domestic law-enforcement operations.
Vice President Dick Cheney has defended the practice as a "perfectly legitimate activity" used to investigate possible acts of terrorism and espionage.
Many of the 1,000 pages of letters and internal documents related to the program and obtained by the ACLU were partially or completely blacked out. But the legible information shows the Pentagon's review of the program found poor coordination.
According to the documents, the internal review recommends that the Department of Defense "provide more specific guidance concerning the definition and use of applicable NSL statutes" and that it "establish guidelines concerning legal review of NSL requests."
It also recommends that the Pentagon collect data concerning the use of national security letters, and that it establish standardized training in the use of the letters for all military counterintelligence agents.
Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said those passages suggest that sufficient data had not been collected, and that training had been lacking.
In addition, Goodman said, the documents highlight conflicting versions of the Pentagon's relationship with the FBI, whose statutory authority to collect information through national security letters is broader than the Pentagon's.
The Pentagon report says there were instances when it could ask the FBI to issue a national security letter on a Defense Department investigation that is not being conducted jointly with the FBI.
But in a response to a congressional inquiry after House and Senate committee briefings in January 2007, the Pentagon asserted that the Defense Department does not ask the FBI to issue national security letters in conjunction with a Defense investigation, according to the documents.
The ACLU filed Freedom of Information Act requests with both the Defense Department and the CIA in April seeking all documents related to secret letters to gain access to personal records of people in the United States.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that protects digital rights, also sought the documents. In June, the ACLU sued to force those agencies to turn over the documents, which were posted on the organization's Web site.
"The expanded role of the military in domestic intelligence gathering is troubling," Goodman said. "These documents reveal that the military is gaining access to records here in the U.S. in secret and without any meaningful oversight. There are real concerns about the use of this intrusive surveillance power."