Wednesday, June 19, 2013

N.Y.T. Warns Against Believing What F.B.I. Director Swears to Be True

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Mueller addressed a proposal to require telephone companies to retain calling logs for five years — the period the N.S.A. is keeping them — for investigators to consult, rather than allowing the government to collect and store them all. He cautioned that it would take time to subpoena the companies for numbers of interest and get the answers back. “The point being that it will take an awful long time,” Mr. Mueller said. ...

[R]ather than being able to instantly query the complete database to see who a suspect has been in contact with, he said, investigators would have to present legal paperwork to a half-dozen carriers and wait for them to gather and provide the records. ...

“You cannot wait three months, six months, a year to get that information, be able to collate it and put it together.” ...

Mr. Mueller did not explain why it would take so long for telephone companies to respond to a subpoena for calling data linked to a particular number, especially in a national security investigation.