[Infowarrior] - New counterterrorism guidelines permit data on U.S. citizens to be held longer

[Richard Forno]

New counterterrorism guidelines permit data on U.S. citizens to be held longer

By Sari Horwitz and Ellen Nakashima, Updated: Thursday, March 22, 5:04 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/new-counterterrorism-guidelines-would-permit-data-on-us-citizens-to-be-held-longer/2012/03/21/gIQAFLm7TS_print.html

The Justice Department has approved guidelines that allow the intelligence community to lengthen the period of time it retains information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism.

Senior U.S. officials familiar with the guidelines said the changes allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community’s clearinghouse for counterterrorism data, to keep such information for up to five years.

Currently, the center must promptly destroy any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism is evident.

The new guidelines, which were approved Thursday, have been in the works for more than a year, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

The guidelines are likely to prompt concern from privacy advocates. Senior Justice Department officials said that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. worked to ensure that privacy protections were adequate. Among other provisions, agencies that share data with the NCTC may now negotiate with the agency that the data be held for shorter periods.

“We have been pushing for this because NCTC’s success depends on having full access to all of the data that the U.S. has lawfully collected,” said Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I don’t want to leave any possibility of another catastrophic attack that was not prevented because an important piece of information was hidden in some filing cabinet.”

Although the guidelines cover a variety of issues, the retention of data was the primary focus of negotiations with federal agencies. Those agencies provide NCTC with information ranging from visa and travel records to data from the FBI.

That information can pertain to non-citizens as well as to “U.S. persons” — American citizens and legal permanent residents.

Under current guidelines, NCTC generally must discard data unrelated to terrorism after 180 days. Those guidelines are “very limiting,” one official said. “On Day 1, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Then six months later all of a sudden it becomes relevant.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the government has taken steps to break down barriers in information-sharing between law enforcement and the intelligence community, but policy hurdles remain.

The NCTC, created by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, collects information from numerous agencies and maintains access to about 30 different data sets across the government. But privacy safeguards differ from agency to agency, hindering effective analysis, senior intelligence officials said.

Officials said the new guidelines are aimed at making sure relevant terrorism information is readily accessible to analysts, while guarding against privacy intrusions.

“A number of different agencies looked at these to try to make sure that everyone was comfortable that we had the correct balance here between the information sharing that was needed to protect the country and protections for people’s privacy and civil liberties,” an official said.

The shootings at Fort Hood in Texas and the attempted downing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 gave new impetus to efforts to aggregate and analyze terrorism-related data more effectively. In the case of Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Hasan had had contact with radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki but that information  had not been shared across the government. The name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate a bomb on a transatlantic flight, had been placed in a master list housed at the NCTC but not on a terrorist watch list that would have prevented him from boarding the plane.

But the new retention period concerns privacy advocates.

The purpose of the safeguards is to ensure that the “robust tools that we give the military and intelligence community to protect Americans from foreign threats aren’t directed back against Americans,” said ACLU national security policy counsel Michael German. “Watering down those rules raises significant concerns that U.S. persons are being targeted or swept up in these collection programs and can be harmed by continuing investigations for as long as these agencies hold the data.”



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