Shakes here...
The Pentagon has found another use for National Security Letters, which at this point should rightly be regarded as the intelligence-gathering equivalent of the presidential signing statement—a stroke of the pen to magically turn dubiously ethical and formerly prohibited actions into perfectly legal maneuvers, with no legislation, no oversight, and no knowledge of the American people required.
The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.
…Pentagon officials said they used [national security letters to gain access to financial records] to follow up on a variety of intelligence tips or leads. While they would not provide details about specific cases, military intelligence officials with knowledge of them said the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.
…[E]ven when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity. Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions.
National Security Letters, you'll no doubt remember, have been at issue regarding the "Pentagon campaign for 'detecting, identifying and engaging' internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters" and the FBI's seizure of reporters' phone records during leak investigations, for a start.
