Pentagon and CIA: Probing into personal records at home

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon, and even the CIA, have in addition to the FBI, looked into the banking and credit records of hundreds of terrorism and espionage suspects in the United States. These requests would be in addition to those made by the FBI, which it has been previously reported, has examined the records of thousands of persons since the 9/11 attacks.

The government requests these personal records using “national security letters,” a vehicle which has been available to the government for almost thirty years. According to the New York Times report, banks and other financial institutions usually voluntarily provide whatever is requested under this cover. According to a Pentagon spokesman, the leads provided by this information are “tremendous.”

A senior Army counterterrorism said that the information obtained through this process is never used to pursue individuals suspected of crimes other than spying or terrorism: “We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which case we’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.
And, in most cases, such information actually eliminates suspects, the Times reports military officials as saying.

However, officials at the Pentagon reportedly told the Times that they plan to maintain the information they obtain through these letters in their intelligence database, called Portico. “You don’t want to destroy something only to find out that the same guy comes up in another report and you don’t know he was investigated before,” a military official was quoted as saying.

The same agency which maintains Portico also maintains another database called Talon, which was criticized for maintaining information on persons whose only reason for inclusion was that they had participated in anti-war protects. When this became known, Talon was reported purged of these types of records.

New provisions enacted in the Patriot Act last year provide for recipients of the national security letters to contact a lawyer and request a court review.