◆ SpookStack

directive to do a review of the use of them in 2006 according to the guidelines that were set out here. COHEN: Thank you. Ms. Caproni, you said that these were all tied to investigations, is that correct? CAPRONI: I said that 1 believed they were all tied to investigation, and that's what we're trying to work through with that unit now. COHEN: If you find that they‘re not tied to investigations, could you make a report to this committee of who those individuals were and why their records were sought when they weren't tied to investigations? CAPRONI: Yes. We will provide this committee with what we find through the course of the spectal inspection. If I could just say, though, based on -- so there's no misunderstanding -- the unit at issue typically gets simply a telephone number. So they don't know -- that's part of what they're charged with finding out is who belongs to this telephone number? What are the toll billing records for this phone number? So the name of the person associated with the phone number is typically not part of what CAU does. And for the exigent letters, to my knowledge -- though, again, the special inspection wil] reveal much more in terms of the ins and outs of what they were doing -- they were working off of telephone numbers and not off of names. COHEN: In the report, it says that some of these violations demonstrated FBI's agents’ confusion and unfamiliarity with the constraints on national security letter authorities. Other violations demonstrated inadequate supervision over the use of these authorities. This is from Mr. Fine's statement. Ms. Caproni, do you think that this is, maybe, indices of a systemic problem in the FBI, where the agents have confusion and unfamiliarity with other policies and other laws. And if so, are you doing something about it? CAPRONI: Congressman, that is exactly what I'm concerned about. And in the discussions that we've had -- and I can tell you that we've had a lot of soul searching at the FBI since then -- this is, you know, we got an F report card when we're just not used to that. So we've had a lot of discussions about this. And one concern is, are we -- you know, most of the agents grew up, the agents my ape in the FBI, all grew up as criminal agents in a system which fs transparent, which, if they mess up in the course of an investigation, they're going to be cross-examined, they're going to have a federal district judge yelling at them.