Thousands of FBI probes after 9/11 stir privacy concerns
Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the FBI assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows. In a vast majority of those cases, FBI agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the FBI had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the FBI initiated 11,667 "assessments" of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed. And based on the information developed in those low- level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.