OIG Lacks Confidence in FBI's Adherence to Woods Procedures

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has said it lacks confidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is executing its Woods Procedures in line with FBI policy when applying for court permission to surveil people in the United States. 

The FBI implemented its Woods Procedures in 2001 following errors in numerous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) in FBI counterterrorism investigations. The procedures, named for FBI agent Michael Woods, who helped devise them, require that every fact submitted in support of a wiretap application must be verified.

FBI policy requires case agents who will be requesting the FISA application to create and maintain a "Woods File" that contains supporting documentation for every factual assertion contained in the application together with the results of required database searches and other verifications.

A report published by the OIG on March 30 states that a recent audit of the FBI found that in some FISA applications, Woods Files had gone missing or may not have ever existed.

Over the past two months, auditors visited 8 FBI field offices and reviewed a judgmentally selected sample of 29 applications relating to US persons and involving both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations. 

The OIG report states that "we could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed." 

In all 25 of the FISA applications the OIG were able to review, audito ..

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