WASHINGTON, 30 May — Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, has ordered a major reorganization of his agency after revelations last week that mid-level managers at the FBI’s Washington headquarters either ignored or suppressed warnings from field agents that could have prevented the 9/11 terror attacks.
Critics of the beleaguered agency say the need to shift the FBI’s mission from merely investigating crimes to actually preventing them is underscored by the bureau’s recent terrorist alert regarding threats to apartment buildings, and news from a Washington-based public organization that in March 2000 an FBI field office deliberately deleted information from its computer files vital to the investigation of people who claimed responsibility for last September’s terror attack.
In Washington, landlords and apartment managers have reacted aggressively — some say irresponsibly — to the FBI’s non-specific warning last week about the possibility of “terrorist groups renting apartment units in various areas of the United States and rigging them with explosives.”
Many building managers have taken the step of posting copies of the terror alert in lobbies and other public areas, causing many tenants to panic. In addition to elevating tensions among people in the area, the notices — say building tenants — may be giving rise to “ethnic profiling” and anti-Arab tensions.
“It’s scary,” says Arna Cohen, a condominium owner in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. Cohen found a terrorist notice stuffed in her mailbox. “Every time I get into the elevator, I look at the person standing next to me in a different way.”
The FBI’s investigation targeting Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network fell victim in March 2000 to technical flaws in the bureau’s Carnivore Internet surveillance system, reports the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington-based public policy research organization. EPIC says the FBI destroyed evidence gathered by a terrorism task force in Denver after the system, now known as DCS1000, mistakenly captured information the agency was not entitled to have.
The system, which has been described by the bureau as an essential crime-fighting tool, allows FBI agents armed with a court order to target those suspected of using the Internet for illegal activities. The system lets the agents scan e-mail messages for certain addresses as they travel through an Internet service-provider network.
The FBI can install a DCS1000 unit at the provider’s network station and configure it to capture e-mail to or from someone under investigation.
According to EPIC, the system in the Denver probes “picked up e-mails on non-covered targets,” according to a March 2000 FBI memo to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington.
“The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take” on the suspect, the memo said.
The documents were made public through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by EPIC.
In the Denver probe, the suspect’s name and other information identifying details of the investigation were deleted. A written report describes the incident as part of a “pattern” indicating “an inability on the part of the FBI to manage” its foreign intelligence activities.
FBI officials yesterday declined to comment on the FBI memo or the investigation to which it referred. They did, however, say that the Bin Laden unit at FBI headquarters handles only investigations involving Al-Qaeda.
EPIC said the FBI memo, dated April 5, 2000, recounts how the Carnivore “software was turned on and did not work correctly.”
EPIC said that when an official at the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review became aware of the problem, to say she was unhappy “would be an understatement.”
