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Error Gave Forbidden E-mail Access To FBI

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By ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times

Published: February 17, 2008

WASHINGTON - A technical problem gave the FBI access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network - perhaps hundreds of accounts or more - instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.
FBI officials blamed an "apparent miscommunication" with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.
Bureau officials noticed a "surge" in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap more data than a judge had authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the FBI.

The episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents the FBI turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought.

Marcia Hofmann, an attorney for the privacy foundation, said the episode raised troubling questions about the controls the FBI had in place to guard against civil liberties abuses.

"How do we know what the FBI does with all these documents when a problem like this comes up?" Hofmann asked.

Michael Kortan, an FBI spokesman, said in an interview that the problem with the unfiltered e-mail went on for just a few days before it was discovered and fixed.

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