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National Security Letters — Part 1

1188 pages · May 11, 2026 · Document date: Dec 4, 1981 · Broad topic: General · Topic: National Security Letters · 1018 pages OCR'd
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TE fully expect Mr. Fine to come back to visit us in future years, and will dutifully take us to task if we have not accomplished that. KELLER: All right. And, Mr. Fine, imagine a housewife in Orlando, Florida. And she does absolutely nothing relevant to terrorism or espionage. She's never met or spoken with a terrorist ora Spy. Based on your investigation, does she have any reason to worry about national security letters violating her privacy, by looking at her phone records, bank records or Internet search records? FINE: ] think that there are times when the FBI looks for telephone records of potential terrorists and looks to see who they've contacted or they've been in contact. Now, it could be intentional contact: it could be inadvertent contact. And as a result of that contact, there can be efforts to look and see what telephone numbers have been called. Now, if they have had no contact whatsoever with the subject of a potential terrorist investigation, it's less likely that there will be -- the records would be obtained here. KELLER: Well, in framing my question, I said no contact, either writing or spoken. So let me ask you, based on your investigation, were there any situations where you saw national security letters being used when there was no relevance whatsoever to international terrorism or espionage? FINE: We couldn't, in our review, look at all the investigative case files and say, "This was -- there was an adequate predicate, there wasn't an adequate predicate.” We looked at how they were used and whether on their face they were improper. So it's impossible for us lo say that the relevancy standard was met. One thing that we did find, however -- and I would note this -- is that, in many cases, the counsel of the FBI field offices, either the chief division counselor or the assistant counsel, did not aggressively and independently look for that. And they're the ones who should be checking on that. They're the ones who need to be sure that there's adequate predicate for this investigation. And we saw, in many cases, that didn’t happen, that they acceded to the wishes of the - - or the arguments of the case agents or the special agents in charge, without independently and aggressively looking at that... KELLER: Let me cut you off there because I have one final question. Ms. Fine (sic), can you give us an example to help make your case, if you have one, as to what's a scenario where a national security letter is your best investigative too!
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