FBI has national eavesdropping program that tracks instant messages, emails and cell phones!
WASHINGTON - April 8, 2008 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States - and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.
Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and given to the Washington Post show that the FBI's massive dragnet, connected to the back ends of telecommunications carriers, “allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cell phone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive,” the Post says.
But agents don't need a court order to track the senders and recipients names, or how long calls or email exchanges lasted. These can be obtained simply by showing it's "relevant" to a probe.
Some transactional data is obtained using National Security Letters. The Justice Department says use of these letters has risen from 8,500 in 2000 to 47,000 in 2005, according to the Post.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union released letters showing that the Pentagon is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance.
Documents show the FBI has obtained the private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, for the military, according to more than 1,000 Pentagon documents reviewed by the ACLU - also using National Security Letters, without a court order.
The new revelations show definitively that telecommunications companies can transfer "with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico" upon request.
