The FBI can lawfully impersonate journalists to trick suspects in investigations, the agency’s inspector general said in a Thursday opinion, nearly a decade after officials impersonated an editor at the Associated Press in order to hunt down a 15-year-old high school student.
The agency’s watchdog said the only exception to the FBI’s ability to impersonate people is when, under “sensitive circumstances,” a suspect should be able to reasonably expect a “professional or confidential relationship” with “an attorney, physician, clergyman, or member of the news media,” which means that in order to conduct an impersonation lawfully, the FBI needs to accomplish its goal with just a limited number of interactions.
The issue arose out of a case involving Charles Jenkins, who in 2007 was a student at Seattle’s Timberline High School. Using European “proxy servers” to mask his location, Jenkins sent daily bomb threats to the school, resulting in its evacuation.
The FBI eventually located Jenkins by having an agent pose as an AP editor. “During subsequent online communications, the undercover agent sent the individual links to a fake news article and photographs that had [malware] concealed within them. The individual activated the computer program when he clicked on the link to the photographs, thereby revealing his location to the FBI,” the IG’s report noted.
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Analysts added the FBI increased its level of oversight for operations involving impersonating journalists in 2016 by requiring approval from the agency’s deputy director in consultation with the deputy attorney general, a step it called a “significant improvement.”
News organizations and civil liberty outfits disapproved of the ruling. “The FBI guidelines adopted in 2016 in response to this incident still permit the FBI to impersonate news organizations and other third parties without their consent in certain cases, and fail to address the host of other dangers associated with FBI hacking,” Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Associated Press Vice President Paul Colford said his organization was “deeply disappointed” in the findings, which he said “effectively condone the FBI’s impersonation of an AP journalist.”
“Such action compromises the ability of a free press to gather the news safely and effectively and raises serious constitutional concerns,” Colford added.
