September 9, 2007 (LPAC)--Confirming a report in the current issue of EIR, today's New York Times reports that the FBI used data-mining techniques to target and investigate persons who were called by the original targets of NSA or FBI surveillance.

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI used "National Security Letters" to obtain information not only on the target of its investigation, but on that target's "community of interest" -- those in contact with the target. A National Security Letter (NSL) is used by the FBI to obtain data secretly from a telecommunications company or a financial institution, without a court order or subpoena. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the use of NSLs is unconstitutional.

According to the documents obtained under FOIA, a number of NSLs directed at telephone companies requested "a community of interest for the telephone numbers on the attached list." According to the Times article, the "community of interest" data is used for a data-mining technique called "link analysis." The FBI stopped the practice earlier this year after the Justice Department's Inspector General issued a report on the abuse of NSLs, unnamed officials are quoted as saying.

EIR reports that link analysis is one of two commonly used data-mining techniques, showing who's connected to whom through phone calls, e-mails, etc.; the other being "pattern analysis," which looks at patterns and changes of activities.

EIR quotes Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies describing how the use of "meta-data"--information on who's calling whom, when, the duration of the call, etc.--and that she is concerned that the FISA bill rammed through Congress by the White House in August "does allow them to get meta-data on virtually all international communications by Americans, and then they do traffic analysis on that, they construct a map that shows your communications with other people.... Those are all questions that the Congress needs to ask this Administration.