Wired: FBI Office May Link to NSA Surveillance

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Wired: FBI Office May Link to NSA Surveillance
By Spencer Ackerman - August 17, 2007, 12:22 PM

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.