LITTLE ROCK — The Justice Department is close to approving guidelines that would allow the intelligence community to lengthen the period of time it retains information about U.S. residents, even if they have no known connection to terrorism.
Senior U.S. officials familiar with the guidelines said the changes would allow the National Counterterrorism Center, the intelligence community’s clearinghouse for counterterrorism data, to keep such information for up to five years.
Currently, the center must promptly destroy any information about U.S. citizens or residents unless a connection to terrorism is evident.
The new guidelines, which may be approved in coming days, have been in the works for more than a year, said officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
The guidelines are likely to prompt concern from privacy advocates. Senior Justice Department officials said Attorney General Eric Holder, who must approve the guidelines, will ensure that privacy protections are adequate.
A major point of negotiation has been how long the National Counterterrorism Center should be able to keep a vast assemblage of data on people who may be regarded as “U.S. persons” — citizens and legal permanent residents. The data, drawn from federal agencies, can range from visa and travel records to information from the FBI.
Current guidelines are “very limiting,” one official said. “On Day 1, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism. Then six months later all of a sudden it becomes relevant.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the government has taken steps to break down barriers in information-sharing between law enforcement and the intelligence community, but policy hurdles remain.
The National Counterterrorism Center, created by the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, collects information from numerous agencies and maintains access to about 30 different data sets across the government. But privacy safeguards differ from agency to agency, hindering effective analysis, senior intelligence officials said.
Officials said the new guidelines are aimed at making sure relevant terrorism information doesn’t just vanish.
The November 2009 shootings at Fort Hood in Texas and the attempted downing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day 2009 gave new impetus to efforts to aggregate and analyze terrorism-related data more effectively. In the case of Fort Hood, Maj. Nidal Hasan had had contact with radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, but that information had not been shared across the government. The name of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate a bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight, had been placed in a master list housed at the counterterrorism center but not on a terrorist watch list that would have prevented him from boarding the plane.
“We have been pushing for this because NCTC’s success depends on having full access to all of the data that the U.S. has lawfully collected,” said Mike Rogers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I have not seen these DOJ guidelines yet, but I will review them carefully to ensure that no walls remain that block NCTC’s access to this information. I don’t want to leave any possibility of another catastrophic attack that was not prevented because an important piece of information was hidden in some filing cabinet.”
But the new retention period concerns privacy advocates.
The purpose of the safeguards is to ensure that the “robust tools that we give the military and intelligence community to protect Americans from foreign threats aren’t directed back against Americans,” said American Civil Liberties Union national security policy counsel Michael German. “Watering down those rules raises significant concerns that U.S. persons are being targeted or swept up in these collection programs and can be harmed by continuing investigations for as long as these agencies hold the data.”
Front Section, Pages 9 on 03/23/2012