◆ SpookStack

As directed by Congress, we endeavored to declassify as much information as possible concerning our use of NSLs tn order to allow the maximum amount of public awareness of the extent of our use of the NSL tool consistent with national security concerns. To that end, for the first time the public has a sense of the frequency with which the FBI makes requests for data with national security letters. In the period covered by the report, the number of NSL requests has ranged trom approximately 40,000 to 60,000 per year and we have requested information on less than 20,000 persons per year. For a variety of reasons that will be discussed below, those numbers are not exact. Nevertheless, they, for the first time, allow the public to get some sense of the order of magnitude of these requests; there are a substantial number of requests, but we are not collecting information on hundreds of thousands of Americans. There are three findings by the OIG that are particularly disturbing, and it is those three findings that I wish to address this morning: (1) inaccurate reporting to Congress of various data points we are obligated to report relative to NSLs; (2) the use of so-called exigent letters that circumvented the procedures required by ECPA; and (3) known violations (both previously self- reported by FBI and not previously reported) of law and policy with regard to usage of NSLs. Congressional Reporting A finding of the report that particularly distresses me ts the section that addresses the inaccuracies of the numbers we report to Congress. That responsibility lies with nry division, and we did not do an acceptable job. The process for tabulating NSLs simply did not keep up with the volume. Although we came to that realization prior to the OIG report and are working on a technological solution, that realization came tater than it should have.