Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The FBI is gathering more and more data through wiretaps or emails these days, much of which sits around waiting to be translated. Instead of hiring more translators, the FBI has allowed the number of staff and contract linguists (1,298) to decline slightly from a peak in 2005. A Department of Justice inspector general’s report says there might be as many as 47,000 hours of counterterrorism audio recordings waiting for review as of September 2008—a fivefold increase in the backlog since 2003.
FBI officials have countered that the IG double counted duplicate recordings, resulting in an inflated total. Only 4,470 hours of tapes were waiting for review, the bureau claimed.
Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), who has criticized the FBI in the past for falling behind on translating potential terrorist-related intelligence, said, “Today’s report appears to point to more of the same by the F.B.I. with its translation department. The FBI needs their feet held to the fire in order to make substantive changes in the translation area.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Language Translation Program (Department of Justice Inspector General) (PDF)
F.B.I. Is Slow to Translate Intelligence, Report Says (by Charlie Savage, New York Times)
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