◆ SpookStack

FINE: I don't think so. It has to be done by Congress. I do think that the committee does need to strike a balance and, sort of, balance the need for protections and controls over civil liberties with the need for tools to prevent and detect and deter terrorism. And that's the difficulty in this task. And that's the real concern that we have about how the FBI implemented this. FEENEY: You said you sampled 77 case files, your report indicates. How many case files are there all together, roughly? FINE: That I couldn't tell you. FEENEY: Do you believe that the 8,850 failed reportings are systemic and that if you extrapolate we'd probably see that elsewhere? FINE: I do believe that the files we looked at were a fair sample and that there's no reason to believe that it was skewed or disproportionate. We didn't cherrypick them. FEENEY: Do you have any reason to believe that there were more abuses in the 8,850 requests that were not properly reported? Are they any more likely to be abuses of civil liberties or the law or the A.G.'s rules than the requests that were properly recorded? FINE: Well, we don't know how many requests were not recorded in the FBI's databases. ‘There were some problems with the database structurally so that things weren't in there. There were delays im entering the database so Congress didn't get the information they wanted. And when we looked at the files, there were NSLs that were in the files that didn't go into the databases -- approximately, I think it was, 17 percent of the ones we found weren't in the database. Now, that's a significant number. And now | know the FBI's trying to find them in the database as we speak, but we have no confidence in the accuracy of that database. FEENEY: Finalty, if ] could, Mr. Chairman, Ms. Caproni, you alluded to the culture of the FBI. which was traditionally a crimefighting institution. Some people have called for an MI5 type of intelligence agency with a different culture. And it might be interesting that you take back the interest that some of us in