Charlie Savage reports this morning on the number of initial “inquiries” done by the FBI that turned into actual investigations:
The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the F.B.I. initiated 11,667 “assessments” of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed. And based on the information developed in those low-level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.
[…]
It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. And because the F.B.I. provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.
Marcy Wheeler notes that while 95% of the assessments don’t bear fruit nonetheless provide the FBI with an opportunity to collect massive amounts of personal information.
I think the problem here is two-fold, and I’m less inclined to blame it on the FBI or the executive branch leadership than I used to be because of Phil Mudd‘s remarks at the Brennan Center’s counterterrorism symposium. The first problem is that through the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Prevention Act, the FBI is now legally compelled to be “preventive” in a manner that can only be done through invasive domestic intelligence gathering. The second problem, which leads back into the first, is that America has a serious resilience problem when it comes to terrorism.
Mudd pointed out that the law mandated that:
[T]he bureau must have a preventive counterterrorism posture, that means stop things before they happen, that means by definition you cannot always tether investigations to proof of criminal activity. It’s not a choice by the Department of Justice, the executive branch, and by people like me. It was what we were told to do by law…By definition if you are preventive there will be people dragged into those investigations who did not do something wrong…So if you want to talk about…Whether adding intelligence increases our ability to prevent, we did not have an option. That’s what the law says…So you have a threat that’s changed to an individual, and I cannot predicate that individual on core al-Qaeda, then you have a law that says if you wait till something happens, we’re going to put your ass in a sling. We don’t care about gang violence, we don’t care about drug violence if one dude who seems to be a terrorist kills people, when there are 15,000 murders in this country every year you’re coming up to testify.
After saying all this, Mudd mumbled that he needed a drink, and you can understand why. Domestically, the U.S. is devoting an incredible amount of resources not just to say, setting off a dirty bomb, but to prevent someone like Nidal Malik Hasan from going postal, because if someone with a Muslim name goes on a rampage and kills one or two people, it has a more traumatic effect on the public than ten people getting killed in a drive by. The issue isn’t just one of law enforcement officials hating freedom, threats to civil liberties are driven by the public’s disproportionate fear of Muslim-related crimes and legislators who are really responsive to those fears when they should be equally concerned with preserving individual rights.
