[Infowarrior] - NSA provided 2-3 daily “tips” to FBI for at least 3 years

[Richard Forno]

(c/o PK)

New documents: NSA provided 2-3 daily “tips” to FBI for at least 3 years

Secret 2007 court order mentions "approximately three telephone identifiers."

by Cyrus Farivar - Jan 20 2014, 6:12pm EST

According to newly-declassified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the National Security Agency (NSA) was (and may still be) tipping off the FBI at least two to three times per day going back at least to 2006.

Hours after President Barack Obama finished his speech last Friday on proposed intelligence and surveillance reforms, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified a number of documents from the nation’s most secretive court.

The new documents are heavily-redacted orders from FISC to the FBI. These items request that the court order an entity (likely a business) to provide “tangible things” under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. The documents do not refer to who the target is, nor which company or organization they apply to.

"The Court understands that NSA expects that it will continue to provide on average approximately three telephone identifiers per day to the FBI,” reads a footnote in a 2007 court order (PDF) authored by FISC Judge Frederick Scullin, Jr.

A similar footnote from a November 2006 court order refers to “two telephone numbers.” The “three” figure was continued until documents from March 2009, when the specific language changed to simply “information.” That month appears to have been a turning point between intelligence agencies and the FISC.

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Some experts speculated that this system of the NSA tipping off the FBI may be an unusual arrangement—analogous to the NSA’s giving information to the Drug Enforcement Agency to prosecute criminal cases.

“I am not sure it tells us anything new but rather adds more confirmation to a widely suspected and occasionally confirmed technique of law enforcement following intelligence leads and then reverse-engineering a paper trail to use in court," Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told Ars. “Some people have even speculated that the multiplicity of overlapping NSA surveillance programs are intended to provide cover programs that provide a more legitimate basis for data found through other programs.”

However, others pointed out that in the absence of further information as to how exactly the NSA’s information is sent to the FBI, and under what circumstances, it’s impossible to know precisely what’s going on.

“Furthermore, given how broadly it's possible to define the word ‘tip,’ we have no information on how useful those thousand tips were,” Brian Pascal, a research fellow at the University of California Hastings College of  the Law, told Ars. “Both intelligence and law enforcement organizations receive many, many tips, and a large part of their job is separating the signal from the noise.

“As far as parallel construction goes, the only thing I can say for certain is that if one records a sufficiently large number of dots, then it's possible to connect them to draw any number of pictures. This is not always the result of nefarious intentions—it can happen unintentionally too. Think about all the people who were improperly placed on watchlists due to conclusions reached by some opaque algorithm.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/new-documents-nsa-provided-2-3-daily-tips-to-fbi-for-at-least-3-years/

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