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Brian4Liberty
03-15-2018, 11:39 PM
FBI supervisor warned Comey in 2014 that warrantless surveillance program was ineffective (http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/378730-fbi-supervisor-warned-comey-in-2014-that-warrantless-surveillance)
By John Solomon and Alison Spann - 03/15/18


An official who supervised the FBI’s Section 215 warrantless phone surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 says he warned then-Director James Comey it was woefully ineffective in catching terrorists and needed to be modified.

Retired Special Agent Bassem Youssef, the chief of the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit, said in an exclusive interview with The Hill that no action was taken by Comey in response to the concerns he raised.

He said his efforts were prompted by an audit his team conducted showing the program had searched through thousands of Americans' records but had helped only disrupt one possible terrorist plot over more than a decade.

“I explained to Director Comey that the special program was largely ineffective, very costly and highly burdensome to our agents in the field,” said Youssef, who supervised the program on a daily basis from 2005 through 2014.
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A lawyer for Comey said the former FBI director, who was fired by President Trump in May 2017, would have no comment.

Republican congressional investigators now examining whether the FBI abused its surveillance powers during its Russia-Trump collusion probe are now pressing for access to the document that Youssef wrote for Comey before his retirement, known inside the intelligence community as the “four options memo,” sources told The Hill.
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The emergence of Youssef, who oversaw the FBI program for most of its existence, could impact all of those investigations, providing new evidence that there was internal dissent inside the FBI about the merits of warrantless surveillance.
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FBI officials continue to insist the program is an essential tool. But Youssef said the internal audit he conducted in 2014 showed the program, in fact, produced little success while often forcing agents in the field to waste time chasing spurious leads generated by the FBI’s analysis of NSA data.

"After instructing the supervisors of my unit to conduct an exhaustive audit of the hundreds of thousands of leads generated since September 11, 2001 until the end of 2013, we determined that the program was credited with only one disruption since 9/11," he said.

The FBI initially reported to Congress that the program had helped disrupt 53 terrorism plots, then reduced the number to 11 before quietly informing lawmakers there was just a single case*, Youssef said, describing the impact of his internal audit.
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“During the meeting I briefed the Director on an improved operational model that would protect civil liberties, greatly increase the effectiveness of terrorist identification and would operate at a fraction of the cost of the existing program,” Youssef said.

Youssef said Comey initially appeared very interested in pursuing the reforms but then the effort lost all momentum. Youssef said bureau leaders told him they preferred to keep the program untouched, if nothing else to be a “safety blanket” if other terrorism tools failed.
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More: http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/378730-fbi-supervisor-warned-comey-in-2014-that-warrantless-surveillance

*Note: Other reports indicate that the single case was actually found via more traditional methods, so the secret warrantless spying was not required to find the "plot".

Swordsmyth
03-15-2018, 11:41 PM
They should give the program a new acronym: TMI