Details of The FBI Name Check Process
The FBI web-site and congressional testimony by the FBI officials provide a detailed step-by-step description of the Name Check Process:
- The first step consists in running a particular name, as well as its close phonetic variants and permutations, through the Universal Index (UNI) of the FBI's Central Records System (CRS). The CRS encompasses the centralized records of FBI Headquarters, field offices, and Legal Attache offices. The CRS contains all FBI investigative, administrative, personnel, and general files. The UNI is searched for “main files”, files where the name of an individual is the subject of an FBI investigation, and for “reference files”, files where the name being searched is just mentioned in an investigation in any context or capacity (including witnesses, victims, neighbors, relatives, co-workers, bystanders, and so on).
- If the initial search of UNI returns no records, the individual's Name Check is cleared. FBI maintains that the majority of the Name Checks are electronically returned as “no record” within 48–72 hours.
- If the initial search results in some "hits" (mentions of the name of the subject of the search or of close variants of that name), a more detailed search is conducted. This more detailed search may involve an NNCP officer requesting from the local offices the actual electronic and physical files related to "hits" that the initial search of UNI generated. After receipt, these files are manually analyzed by an NNCP officer to determine if they pertain to the actual subject of the Name Check and if they contain any derogatory information about that subject; additional files may be requested later and the entire process may be repeated several times. In the process NNCP officers need coordinate with 56 field offices and retrieve files stored in 265 locations nationwide.
- Less detailed Name Checks are also possible. The agency requesting a Name Check pays FBI a fee that depends on the level of detail required. The requesting agency can also specify different levels of priority and set specific deadlines for the Name Checks that it requests.
Read more about this topic: FBI Name Check
Famous quotes containing the words details of, details, fbi, check and/or process:
“Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“The process of education in the oldest profession in the world is like any other educational process, in that it requires time and effort and patience; it can only be acquired by taking one step at a time, though the steps become accelerated after the first few.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)