Posted on 07/28/2005 11:20:10 AM PDT by WmShirerAdmirer
The FBI's backlog of untranslated audio recordings from terrorism and espionage investigations grew markedly in the past year, the Justice Department's internal watchdog said Wednesday.
The FBI is capturing and reviewing more conversations than ever in languages associated with terrorists, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in a report. "The FBI's collection of audio material continues to outpace its ability to review and translate all that material," Fine said. His findings were similar in a July 2004 audit, except that he said the FBI now does a better job prioritizing its translation work. Fine released his report at an FBI oversight hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
There were 707,742 hours of unreviewed recordings at the end of March, a 50 percent increase over the start of 2004, Fine said. The bureau no longer is running behind on intercepts relating to al-Qaida cases. The FBI said those backlogged recordings include hundreds of thousands of hours of white noise and other unintelligible audio, conversations in closed cases and mistakenly captured exchanges.
But even by its own measure, the FBI's counterterrorism audio backlog more than doubled, Fine said. FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying at the same hearing, said much of the backlog is in obscure languages for which translators are hard to find. He told senators that the bureau is able "to promptly address all of our highest priority counterterrorism intelligence, generally within 24 hours."
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
.....how many more languages.....?
sarcasm ping
..............NO PROFILING ALLOWED.........
/ACLU?
They need to have the folks over at DARPA lend them a hand, as they are way out in front on this.
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