"Afterthought" was, perhaps, the incorrect word. What I meant to convey, however, is that the meat of the investigation centered around file access of the FBI database. The rest is just spaghetti they threw up on the wall to see which noodles would stick. The key paragraphs, IMO, from the original WSJ report, these are the basis of my opinion:
<SNIP>
P1. "The investigation that led to charges against five people, including a current and a former FBI agent, with using confidential government data to manipulate stock prices was an almost accidental result of probes into the Sept. 11 terror attacks and to some degree convicted spy Robert Hanssen.
P2. Authorities began looking into the activities of Anthony Elgindy , an Egyptian-born investor who was among those indicted, as part of the wide-ranging net cast by investigators looking for potential financiers of Muslim groups with links to terrorism last fall, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation official.
P3. That inquiry found nothing connecting Mr. Elgindy with terrorist groups or their financing, but eventually led authorities to believe he was getting information from FBI insiders, who clued him into confidential data about public companies facing criminal problems or investigations. So close was Mr. Elgindy to Jeffrey Royer, the former FBI agent charged in the case, that Mr. Royer wrote a letter identifying himself as an FBI agent vouching for Mr. Elgindy's help "in combating fraudulent activities via the stock market and Internet."
</SNIP>
<SNIP>
P8. "A person with knowledge of the probe said the Securities and Exchange Commission also looked into whether Mr. Elgindy profited from the attacks, but found nothing untoward. Neither did a Justice Department inquiry, an official said.
P9. At some point last year, however, the FBI's interest into Mr. Elgindy morphed into a securities-fraud investigation of his trading patterns. Last fall, the FBI got in touch with the SEC for help in analyzing his trading records.
P10. Piquing the investigators' interest was the quality of the information he was putting out over the Internet about companies he focused on. Some of it seemed to make references to criminal histories that could have come from the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, while other tidbits seemed to come from the FBI computerized case-file system.
P11. "A lot of that information would be considered insider information and could impact companies and stock prices," said the FBI official. "It didn't take much to figure this information is coming out of our confidential files."
P12. "Once authorities realized that, they began focusing the investigation internally by tracing who inside the FBI was accessing the databases. FBI agents are given individual passwords and logons to use the systems, and there are electronic trails every time they access the databases. In the aftermath of the Hanssen spy case, the agency has become much more diligent in tracking who accesses what internal computer files and why.
P13. "Computers are a dangerous thing," noted another FBI agent familiar with the case. "You can tell who is looking at what cases. And in this case, it raised the question: Why in the hell would somebody in Albuquerque be looking at some of these cases?"
Somebody has reprinted the WSJ report about it ("Terror Probe's Long Tendrils") over here (probably in violation of WSJ's copyright, but that's a different issue).
suite101.com |
