WASHINGTON — Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the FBI assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows.
In a vast majority of those cases, FBI agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the FBI had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
The document, which covers the four months from December 2008 to March 2009, says the FBI initiated 11,667 "assessments" of people and groups. Of those, 8,605 were completed.
And based on the information developed in those low- level inquiries, agents opened 427 more intensive investigations, it says.
The statistics shed new light on the FBI's activities after the 2001 terrorist attacks, as the bureau's focus has shifted from investigating crimes to trying to detect and disrupt potential criminal and terrorist activity.
It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. Because the FBI provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.
Still, privacy advocates contend that the large number of assessments that turned up no sign of wrongdoing show that the rules adopted by the Bush administration have created too low a threshold for starting an inquiry. Attorney General Eric Holder has left those rules in place.
American Civil Liberties Union policy counsel Michael German, a former FBI agent, argued that the volume of fruitless assessments showed that the Obama administration should tighten the rules.
"These are investigations against completely innocent people that are now bound up within the FBI's intelligence system forever," German said. "Is that the best way for the FBI to use its resources?"
But Valerie Caproni, the bureau's general counsel, said the numbers showed that agents were running down any hint of a potential problem.
"Recognize that the FBI's policy — that I think the American people would support — is that any terrorism lead has to be followed up," Caproni said. "That means, on a practical level, that things that 10 years ago might just have been ignored now have to be followed up."
FBI officials said in an interview that the statistics represented a snapshot as of late March 2009, so the 11,667 assessment files were generated over a roughly four-month period. But they said they thought that agents had continued to open assessments at roughly the same pace since then.
FBI officials also said about 30 percent of the 11,667 assessments were just vague tips — such as a report of a suspicious car that included no license plate number.