Box Office Update 3/14-3/16: Hears the Box Office Call

Family Animation rises to the top.
The family film always has the opportunity rise to the top and when that family film is a computer animated tale there is an even better chance that it will succeed at the box office. Besides hitting a wide range of demographics, it is, as a family film, much more likely to bring out the family as a whole, opposed to picking it apart with an R or...

Is there a Google Adwords Slap going on? March 5, 2008

There is another Google Slap going on In Google Adwords, after their recently Quality Score update about Landing Page Load Time Affects Quality Score. The truth is that the article that I posted, was in a queue for 10 days with Wordpress Timestamp fuction, and then this Google adwords slap has been affecting all advertisers in Google adwords. Here are some Adwords advertisers testimonials:

its been a while, I was wondering if people notice a google slap today…march 5,2008?

I have several keywords that has really high ctr becoming inactive. 16.39%, 31.51% and 32.88% ctr examples below.

Keyword Status Help Quality Score Help Current Bid Max CPC Clicks Impr. CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos
keyword Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 79 482 16.39% $0.28 $21.98 2.7
keywordb Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 836 2,653 31.51% $0.18 $148.10 2.1
keywordc Inactive for search Increase quality or bid $0.50 to activate Poor Minimum bid: $0.50 $0.45 4,124 12,541 32.88% $0.30 $1,250.81 2.1

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Southwest Grounds 42 Boeing Jets Overnight Amid Inquiry Into Safety Record -- Update

Following reports yesterday that Southwest Airlines and FAA officials may have falsified safety reports, the airline suddenly grounded 42 of its Boeing jets last night. (News reports differ about the exact number grounded -- some say 41 planes were grounded.)

The move comes a week after the Federal Aviation Administration announced plans to fine the airline $10.2 million for failing to conduct required safety checks and for continuing to fly un-inspected planes even after the airline knew that it was in violation of safety rules.

The FAA is also under investigation by the Department of Transportation's inspector general after two of its employees blew the whistle on supervisors who, they claim, failed to force Southwest to ground the planes last March when the airline first notified the FAA that it had failed to conduct inspections. The FAA whistleblowers say they experienced retribution when they tried to get supervisors to investigate the issue with Southwest.

It's unclear from the news reports out today why the airline grounded the planes last night. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Southwest, when it finally got around to conducting inspections last year, discovered cracks in half a dozen planes. I have calls in to the FAA and Southwest.

UPDATE: Although Southwest hasn't returned my call, the FAA just released a brief statement providing a little more information about the grounding of 41 planes last night. The statement says, in part:

UPDATE II: Southwest just called back. Company spokeswoman Brandy King says the planes were grounded last night in relation to a five-year-old service bulletin that Boeing had released back in 2002 that addressed "skin around the windows" of the aircraft.

King told me the bulletin affected 44 Southwest planes, but only 38 were actually grounded last night. That's because of the 44 planes, five were already undergoing maintenance and a sixth plane had been retired from Southwest's fleet since the 2002 bulletin was released. The airline has since put 25 of the 38 planes back in service and expects to complete inspection on the remaining planes by this evening.

Southwest Airlines notified the FAA that, as part of an internal safety audit, they last night grounded 41 aircraft until they could verify with the FAA that they had correctly followed inspection guidance stated in an airworthiness directive related to a specific area of the aircraft surrounding the windows on 737-300's and -500's.

Photo: AP

• FAA and Southwest Airlines Accused of Falsifying Safety Reports
• Boeing's New 787 May Be Vulnerable to Hacker Attack
• FAA Responds to Boeing Security Story
• Boeing Employee Fired for Discussing Computer Security Problems at Company

MoveOn Launches Contest for Voter-Created Obama Ads

A YouTube search on Thursday yielded more than 100,000 results for the keyword "Obama," and in the recent second Super Tuesday contest between the two Democratic presidential candidates, senator Barack Obama's campaign blanketed Ohio television stations with $4.4 million in advertisements -- nearly twice the amount that senator Hillary Clinton spent.

Outside groups also spent significant amounts for the candidates on March 4, with a couple of union groups spending more than $1 million combined to air nearly 2,500 spots for Obama in Ohio, according to a recent report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nevertheless, MoveOn thinks we need yet another Obama video. Created by you.

MoveOn, which has endorsed Obama, is asking voters to create and submit a 30-second advertisement about Obama. The group will announce the winner on April 17 -- just five days before the next big primary for the Democrats in Pennsylvania.

Apart from the sheer thrill of having your creation air in front of millions of campaign-addled eyeballs in Pennsylvania, you could also win $20,000 in video and editing equipment. Your talent may also catch the eye of Oliver Stone, Tom Ortenberg, the president of Lionsgate Entertainment, or James Schamus, the president of Focus Features, who are on MoveOn's eclectic panel of celebrity judges.

The public will have five days to vote for their favorite videos. Then the panel of notables get to do the final judging.

In addition to Stone, Ortenberg and Schamus, its members include Reverend Jesse Jackson, actors Ben Affleck, Steve Buscemi, Matt Damon, Adrian Grenier of Entourage, musical heroes and net neutrality-supporters Moby and Eddie Vedder, liberal blog ubermeister Markos Moulitsas, and cyberlaw guru Larry Lessig.

MoveOn says that it'll be more diligent this time around about filtering submissions. In 2004, some supporters created an uproar when they created videos for MoveOn's Bush-in-30-seconds-or-less contest and compared the president to Adolph.

President Bush's campaign then used snippets from those controversial videos in its own campaign advertising.

"Since this is a positive ad contest, every submission will be screened by staff to be certain that they meet guidelines prior to posting them on the public web site," says  MoveOn spokeswoman Ilyse Hogue. "If they do not meet the criteria, they will not be posted."

So behave. Follow da roolz, get out there, and get creative (if you're an Obama supporter and an aspiring film-maker.)

Search Engine Optimization: Determine Theme Relevance

What is theme relevance? Is this your first time that you heard about it?. When you are in an online business you are competiting with your competitors and sometimes you follow their steps, building links as much as they have and much more. But as I mentioned many times, Backlinks is ONE important factor and theme relevance is another important factor to get higher rankings and beat your competitor.

How many times you heard about the wars that search engines are doing between them. Google now is the #1 Search engine and the most used. They are competing with the market share and they want as many eyeballs like you on their search engine (index) to increase exposure for their advertisers so like this they will have billions of dollars and increase their stocks. That is one of the reasons why search engines make drastic changes in their algorithm so they can give the best accurate results.

That’s why theme relevance is important to them. If you start building backlinks with high authority sites you may rank very well but when they change their algorithm you may get dropped and your online business is bankrupty (In case you put your eggs in search engines, which 99.9% of us do).

When you start an online business (any type of site) to make money online you have to create a solid base and follow search engine rules. How we can do that? How Google determines the theme of your site? The answer is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).

I will publish more articles and guides about What is Latent Semantic Indexing with some examples so you can understand it very well and start creating relevance theme sites.

Exclusive Network Solutions Coupons Codes

Few days ago I posted about Network Solution Coupons Codes For March 2008 and today Network Solutions gave me some exclusive coupon codes especially for Googlelady’s readers.

Network Solution is one of the oldest registrar that exists on the internet. They were here before any other. Many bloggers have been register their domain name through network solutions like John Chow. Is true that their prices are higher than anyone but using coupons and promo codes like the ones I am posting here will get you cheaper with a company that is the #2 in Domain name registrations and #2 in Hosting accounts (What they claim). Check out the extensions that most registrar don’t offer.

Network Solutions Domain Names Coupon:
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Jewerly Coupons: Design Bands Coupons Codes

This month I posted another way to make money online which consist on the gold market. Then after this article I have been asked many times where do I buy the gold and then resell it. I told them that there are many online places that you can buy your jewelry but to benefit you will need to buy them with a cheaper price, that’s why many online stores offers coupons and I will be posting these series of jewelry coupons posts so those that want to buy them and then resell it and get a profit from them.
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Building Links Case Study: The Plan

This is part of Building Links with Text Link Ads case study.

If you want to make money online with blogs, sites, affiliate marketing or anything related to Online business you need a plan. Even a plan for your marketing strategies like Building links to your website. To succeed in any business even more in Online business you need to make a plan and Follow it. This is my small plan on this case study and hopefully I can follow. If you want to follow this case study and follow me you can open an account with Text Link Ads (If you sign up, or buy links after clicking my Aff. link it will be appreciated, thanks!).

Writting Unique Content

If you build backlinks in a site that don’t have unique content will be worthless. So my plan as always in a new project will be writting unique content.

Buy Relevancy and Not Pagerank

Most of the webmasters thinks that Pagerank is all, and they focuss on getting backlinks from sites that have higher pageranks even if the site has nothing to do with your theme (Niche, Topic…). I will try to find the best related-sites to the top keywords that I am trying to rank well.

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Spy Law Debate Not About You, But You Should Care

If the government isn't spying on you, then why should you care about whether the government follows wiretapping laws?

That's a complicated and much-asked question, one that this reporter totally flubbed on a not-to-be named NPR show that thinks it's cool to pretend that news is hard.

Reason magazine contributing editor Julian Sanchez, however, did much better in print in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times. 

After a short history of politically motivated spying -- including examples I'd long forgotten or never known, Sanchez explains why spying laws matter, even if you never say anything the spooks would want to hear anyways.

It's probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don't plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second.

Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king -- something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won't turn its "national security" surveillance powers to political ends -- well, it would be a first.

I've always thought of the importance of the laws as being about the architecture of the spying apparatus.

Meaning that the difference between a democratic regime with unfettered access to the nation's communication tools and an despotic regime with the same access is simply good will.

And good will rarely stops the momentum of a bureaucracy convinced it knows best. Or if you let me, good will is no Hoover dam.

Photo: Hoover dam taken by Minnet Lane.

 

House Debates, Holds Rare Secret Session

As Thursday night crawled toward midnight in Washington, D.C., the House of Representatives prepared to go into a secret session, whose first rule is "Don't talk about the secret session."

But prior to the one-hour secret session, House members spoke a lot about the secret session.

For more than an hour they debated the nuances of a proposed secret session of the House that the Republicans wanted in order to share secret information about a secret wiretapping program that is being debated by Congress due to a secret ruling from a secret spying court about the legality of the President's secret spying program.

The House is scheduled to vote on legislation about spying and legal amnesty for partners in the president's secret wiretapping program tomorrow, though that vote was ostensibly scheduled for Thursday and could get postponed again.

The gavel and curtain fell on the secret session discussion a little after 7:30 pm D.C. time. C-Span went dark. and the secret session is expected, though not known, to begin at 8:00 pm

The secret session, according to a secret source, likely won't start until closer to 11 p.m., giving the House security guards time to do a security sweep.

It will take the guards two hours to search for secret wiretapping bugs so that lawmakers can safely talk about secret wiretapping programs.

The session will be only the sixth secret session of the House of Representatives, and the first since 1983. (For more on the secret session, see this previous post).

New York Democratic Congressman Jose Serrano said he's not going.

"If I forget and mention some of that debate in this debate [tomorrow], what kind of trouble am I in?," Serrano asked. "This makes American people think we don't want to discuss in public some things and may in fact strike fear into members to vote for a bill they should not vote for."

Under questioning prior to the debate, Republican whip Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) said he doesn't have new secret information, just secret information that only members of the intelligence committees have seen.

"I haven't suggested it is at the Top Secret level or at the program level," Blunt said. "This is information it would be helpful for all members to talk about. I'm not going to talk about the Top Secret part of the program, but I have some information that would help the debate that rises to the secret level."

While members can't later speak about any classified or unclassified information discussed in the meeting, Senate Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) clarified that members were free to say they went to the secret session.

Some Democratic lawmakers, such as Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) and Rep. David Scott (D-Georgia), questioned the timing and the motives behind the secret session.

"Is this not a political ploy?" Scott asked.

"Is this not a Trojan horse? Is this not a misuse of the House?" Scott asked, suggesting the Republicans will later use the session to vilify Democrats who votes against expansive wiretapping powers.

"Is it worth it to really undermine the openness in government?" Scott continued. "Our nation's history is littered with examples of secrecy when there should have been openness."

Blunt grew visibly weary of the questioning and the expectations, noting that the House had now discussed the secret session for longer the planned duration of the secret session.

"You could argue the discussion will be well worth the time," Blount said.

Perhaps Blunt has a photo of Osama Bin Laden imprisoned in Room 641a, who will be let out if the Congress forces the close down its spying rooms inside the United States..

Former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) says he's not going either.

"Without referring to any content of any secret meeting I have been too, I have found from my own experiencing that secret meetings tend to be occasions for communication of information of dubious value," Kucinich said.

Since coat room attendants won't be allowed to the secret meeting, members will be told when the secret session begins via email, according to Hoyer.

One assumes he means secret, encrypted email, of course.

House Passes Spy Bill, Rejects Telcom Amnesty Despite Veto Threat

Democrats continued their defiance of President Bush on Friday over his secret wiretapping program, passing a spying bill that calls for a commission to investigate the program, and refusing to give amnesty to telecoms that collaborated with the warrantless surveillance.

House Democratic leaders secured passage of the spying bill known as the FISA Amendments Act by a vote of 213 to 197, four weeks after a similar measure was defeated by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. That defeat led to the expiration of a temporary spying measure, setting off a week-long Republican effort to scare the American people with phantoms of lost wiretaps.

Republicans were championing a Senate bill that includes amnesty for telecoms and gives the nation's spies wide powers to wiretap using facilities inside the United States with little court oversight.

Instead of caving to that rhetoric, the House Democrats doubled down on their original legislation, by including a call for a commission, armed with subpoena power, that would investigate the secret spying. The bill also allows telecoms to defend themselves in court by showing secret documents to federal judge. The Bush administration had blocked them from using classified information in their own defense.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which brought the leading suit against the nation's telecoms, applauded the House's moxie.

"Amnesty proponents have been claiming on the Hill for months that phone companies like AT&T had a good faith belief that the NSA program was legal," EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston said. "Under this bill, the companies could do what they should have been able to do all along: tell that story to a judge."

The White House had no such kind words, saying the bill was "partisan" and would be "dead on arrival" in the Senate.

"The House of Representatives took a significant step backward in defending our country against terrorism and passed a partisan bill that will please class-action trial lawyers at the expense of our national security," White House Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto said in a statement. 

Now the House and Senate bills will need to be reconciled, and sent to the president, which won't happen for weeks due to the pending Easter recess.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said, "While the threat level remains high, some in this country, and in Congress, want us to let our guard down. The Pelosi Democrats are rolling the dice with our national security."

Threat Level would like to point out that Bond clearly hasn't seen our threat meter, which is now green. Also the official threat level is yellow, or "elevated."

President Bush has repeatedly claimed that there's an urgent national security need for new spying legislation. But he also says he'll veto any surveillance bill that does not grant retroactive immunity to the companies that turned over phone records and access to internet cable fibers to the government.

Bush argues that the participating companies were patriots, and that they would stop complying with lawful court orders in the future if not freed from the lawsuits accusing them of conducting illegal surveillance for Bush.

But it will likely be politically difficult to veto a bill containing new spying powers Bush himself says are vital to American's security, simply because a couple of deep-pocketed corporations are facing lawsuits for violating federal privacy laws.

The bill, H.R. 3773, is not immediately available on that THOMAS website, but when posted it will be here. A draft of the bill is available here (.pdf).

See Also:

• House Debates, Holds Rare Secret Session
• Republicans Walk Out As Democrats Confront Bush Over Spying Deadline
• Deceptive Republican Attack Ad Slams Clinton, Obama for Slowing Domestic Spying
• Democratic Lawmaker Pushing Immunity Is Newly Flush With Telco Cash

Ukrainian Cybercrime Capo Now a Politician

In a new twist on the old cliche of politicians who become crooks, a Ukrainian cybercrime chief that I wrote about last year in a three-part series about cybercrime gangs is now turning to politics and launching a new political party in Ukraine.

Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov (in both photos at right), a 24-year-old who went by the online nic "Script" only a couple of years ago, was considered one of the godfathers of East European carding rings until Ukrainian authorities arrested him in 2005 at the urging of U.S. law enforcement agents. Golubov helped launch a former site called CarderPlanet, an international crime site where hackers and carders congregated to plot their schemes and traffic in stolen credit and debit card numbers.

As I wrote previously, Golubov eluded capture for more than a year due to a lack of interest on the part of local authorities in arresting him. Then the Orange Revolution swept the Ukraine, and a door of cooperation suddenly opened. But six months after Golubov was nabbed by local police, a court released him on bond after two Ukrainian politicians vouched for him.

Now, as Brian Krebs at WashingtonPost.com reports, Golubov has thrown his newsboy cap into the political ring as one of the founders of the Internet Party of Ukraine, which vows to root out public corruption -- as well as computerize the country and provide free computer classes and foreign-language training to citizens.

According to Krebs, should Golubov get elected, he would be immune from prosecution for his crimes -- presumably this refers to retroactive immunity.

Photo: U.S. Postal Inspection Service; Internet Party of Ukraine

See also:

• Part I: I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI
• Part II: Tightening the Net
• Part III: The Boards Come Crashing Down
• Sidebar: Tracking the Russians
• Secret Service Operative Moonlights as Identity Thief
• Confessions of a Cybermule
• E-Gold Gets Tough on Cybercrime

Congress Holds Rare, Secret Spying Session Thursday - Update

The House of Representatives will shutter C-Span's cameras Thursday afternoon and evict citizens and reporters from the chambers to hold an extremely rare, one-hour secret session where Republicans say they will present information about the current spying debate that cannot be publicly discussed.

The secret session, only the sixth in the House's history and the first since 1983, comes just hours ahead of a planned vote pushes until Friday a vote on a new proposal from House Democrats who oppose giving amnesty to telecoms that helped President Bush's warrantless, domestic wiretapping program.

House Democrats also want more court oversight over how the NSA operates wiretaps placed inside the United States. Such taps have been largely illegal for the past 30 years, but both the House and Senate were persuaded to give the NSA the power to install wiretaps in phone and internet switches, as well as on the servers of email providers like Microsoft and Google.

Those taps are not supposed to be used to target Americans, but can collect their communications if an American communicates with someone suspected to be a foreigner.

According to a 2004 Congressional Research report (.pdf), members and staff may not divulge information from secret sessions, and the staff must sign secrecy oaths. Secrecy violators can be punished with fines, loss of seniority and even expulsion.

Unless the House votes otherwise, a transcript won't be available for thirty years.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) requested the session, which House Majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) agreed to so that "the Members may hear this information," according to a Hoyer press release.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), a critic of immunity and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, warned that the Republicans better have something important to share.

"I believe in the use of secret sessions in the House when they are intended to truly educate members on the issues and provide them with valuable classified information," Holt said. "Secret sessions should not be used as a cynical, delaying tactic to block the House from voting on critical legislation that would strengthen our intelligence collection efforts and protect the American people from warrantless surveillance."

"I will be interested to see if Mr. Boehner truly has new classified information on this program to share with members of the House, and I will seek the opportunity to inform my colleagues of what I have learned about this program and the President's actions in this matter."

Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) is skeptical this is more than a delaying tactic. He helms the House Judiciary committee and has seen many of the classified documents.

"There must be a very high bar to urge the House into a secret session for the first time in 25 years," Conyers said in a press release. "I eagerly await their presentation to see if it clears this threshold. As someone who has seen and heard an enormous amount of information already, I have my doubts."

Republicans and Democrats will each control 30 minutes of the one-hour debate, after which the secret session will be dissolved and the web streams will resume.

See Also:

• Senate Approves Telco Amnesty, Legalizes Bush's Secret Spy Program
• NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven ...
• Secret Spy Ruling Contaminates Debate
• FBI Recorded 27 Million FISA 'Sessions' in 2006
• Can the NSA Wiretap in Iraq Without A Warrant?

FBI Tried to Cover Patriot Act Abuses With Flawed, Retroactive Subpoenas, Audit Finds

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI's counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas "retroactively to justify the FBI's acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests," the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine's 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.

With the flawed follow-up letters, the Counterterrorism division attempted to provide retroactive legal justification for telephone data the division had gotten on 3,860 phone numbers, gotten either through verbal requests to the companies or false emergency requests.

The letters are related to still-secret contracts the FBI's Communication Analysis Unit has with AT&T, Verizon and MCI. The contracts pay the companies to store subscribers' phone records for longer periods of time and to provide faster service for FBI subpoenas. Those contracts began in May 2003, but the FBI refuses to release them.

At least one of the letters was signed by an assistant director and none were cleared with the FBI's general counsel.

FBI agents issue tens of thousands of National Security Letters annually to get phone records, portions of credit histories, and track down IP addresses without getting a judge's approval in cases involving suspected terrorism, computer crimes or espionage.

Additionally, some of those retroactive NSLs sought records that the FBI was not authorized to obtain, and failed to explain -- as required by policy -- what investigation the records pertained to. Fine found that all were "issued in violation of internal FBI policy."

In his 2007 report on the FBI's use of that Patriot Act power during 2003 to 2005, Fine disclosed that officials at the counter-terrorism division had issued more than 700 emergency requests for data to telephone companies -- so-called exigent letters -- most with false promises that a court order was in the works and would be delivered after the fact. Those letters prompted a further investigation of those letters, including a reported criminal probe of counter-terrorism officials, and Thursday's report says an in depth report on that office is forthcoming.

The report shows the need for Congress to narrow the FBI's powers and strengthen privacy laws, according to Mike German, a longtime FBI agent who now works for the ACLU, who says it's clear the FBI has been breaking the law.

"The FBI has flagrantly put aside the rule of law and its internal guidelines time and again," German said "This is the kind of abuse that is inevitable when we broaden the government's surveillance power and do not attempt to modernize privacy standards. Both the House and Senate have bills waiting to be marked up that will greatly limit this authority. Congress needs to act on this now."

The 187-page report (.pdf) focused on NSL usage in 2006 and how the FBI attempted to correct the abuses brought to light by last year's report.

Fine said the FBI had made "significant progress in implementing our recommendations," but tempered that statement by concluding "it is too soon to definitively state whether the news systems and cohntrols developed by the FBI and the Department will eleiminate fully the problems with the use of NSLs."

The Justice Department issued a statement Thursday saying it was pleased with Fine's assessment of their efforts after his 2007 report and downplayed the report's revelations of abuses in 2006, saying it is "no surprise that this year's report found problems similar to those identified in the first OIG report, which covered the period 2003 through 2005."

The Inspector General took issue with the FBI's inability to track where data is shared or if the data is used in criminal prosecutions by state and local law enforcement. The report also criticized the FBI's insistence that all data collected by the letters -- even phone records that cleared a suspect -- should be stored for decades in the FBI's massive Investigative Data Warehouse. That storehouse allows investigators to search for and comb through data from other investigations.

The FBI issued 49,425 NSLs in 2006, up slightly from 2005's 47,221 requests. Since NSLs can name more than one person, phone number or email address, it is not known how many persons were investigated through these requests. In a footnote, Fine reveals that in a 2004 investigation the FBI issued 9 NSLs that sought subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.

The report also shows that the FBI is increasingly targeting citizens and green card holders, with more than 11,517 requests in 2006 targeting U.S. persons, while Non U.S. persons were targeted with 8,605 requests.

See Also:

• Court Strikes Down Key Patriot Act Power Again
• FBI to Fix NSL Problems with Software
• National Security Letters Back in the Spotlight
• FBI Broke Law Using Patriot Powers, Former FBI Agent Says
• FBI Office Under Investigation Involved in Secret Spying ...