FBI Provided Inaccurate Data for Surveillance Warrants

Senior Justice officials said they have begun a comprehensive review of all terrorism-fighting tools and their compliance with the law. That will be followed by regular audits and training to ensure that agents do not lapse into shortcuts that can cause unintended legal consequences.

Wainstein noted that before his division was created last year, the Justice Department could not systematically check FBI compliance with rules in all types of national security investigations. He acknowledged, for instance, that the department was told of 26 potential violations that the FBI had disclosed in its use of national security letters but did not focus on them.

Earlier this year, President Bush agreed to allow the FISA court to review surveillance requests from the National Security Agency after a battle with civil liberties groups and some lawmakers over the legality of that agency's spying effort, in which some suspects were overseas.

Last year's problems involving the FISA court, however, involved the issuance of secret warrants that authorized FBI agents to conduct surveillance inside the United States.

Shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FISA court complained that there were inaccuracies in 75 warrants that the court had approved going back several years. The FBI responded by instituting new policies to better ensure that the information agents provided in warrant applications was accurate and could be verified if questioned.

But audits conducted beginning in 2003 showed an increasing number of errors and corrections in applications. On Dec. 12, 2005, the court sent a letter of complaint that raised the idea of agents being compelled to swear to the accuracy of information.

Justice and the FBI are reviewing about 10 percent of the 60,000 ongoing terrorism investigation files in search of problems. "We are learning to live in a different environment, and now we are aware and working on problems, and I think we are creating a lot of fixes," said Jane Horvath, the Justice Department's first chief privacy and civil liberties officer.

FBI officials said they expect the audit of national security letters for 2006 to show the same problems as those identified in the current audit, which covered 2003 through 2005.

"You are never going to be at a zero error rate because this is a human endeavor," Wainstein said. "Therefore it is subject to error on occasion. But we're going to do everything we can to minimize them."