An in-house review of the FBI has found the agency failing to go far enough in its expansion of physical and cyber surveillance programs, urging the bureau to recruit deeper networks of informants and bring its technological abilities up to pace with other intelligence agencies.

While billed as a damning critique of the FBI, the in-house assessment known as the 9/11 Review Commission primarily attacks the bureau for not moving fast enough to become a domestic intelligence agency, precisely the direction in which the FBI has pivoted since the 2001 terror attacks.

The majority of the panel’s findings recommend bureaucratic changes – such as expanded training for FBI intelligence analysts or expanding cooperation with local and state law enforcement through the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force – or otherwise urge Director James Comey onward in the long-set course he and predecessor Robert Mueller have set, such as bolstering the FBI’s “human intelligence” (Humint) network of informants.

In particular, the report found that the agency fails to support analysts and linguists who interpret intelligence behind the scenes. The “imbalance” between support for field agents and analysts “needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates”, the report’s authors wrote.

Yet the “Review Commission cannot say that with better JTTF collaboration, Humint or even intelligence analysis that the FBI would have detected those plots beforehand”, the panel concedes, offering only that FBI counterterrorism “might have benefited” with an acceleration of what the agency has already been doing.

Much of the report remarked approvingly on the FBI’s activities of the past decade, praising the way it shares information with government agencies and the new rules that allow it to surveil a target without a warrant.

“With the new and almost entirely unclassified AG Guidelines, special agents working on national security issues could now at the assessment stage ‘recruit and task sources, engage in interviews of members of the public without a requirement to identify themselves as FBI agents and disclose the precise purpose of the interview, and engage in physical surveillance not requiring a court order’ just as special agents working on organized crime investigations could do,” the authors wrote.

Bulk searches and ‘mainstream’ Muslims: what’s not in the report

The commission, composed of establishment figures like Reagan attorney general Ed Meese and former Indiana centrist Democratic representative Tim Roemer, had significantly less to say about the major policy controversies emerging from the FBI’s domestic intelligence expansion.

Last year, the federal government’s civil liberties watchdog confirmed that FBI agents can search international communications from Americans collected in bulk from the National Security Agency without even a log of their access. Numerous studies, including a 2010 Justice Department report, have confirmed that the FBI abused its powers to issue nonjudicial subpoenas known as “exigent letters” or “national security letters” to improperly access Americans’ phone data.

Perhaps most controversially, the FBI stands accused of tracking American Muslims’ constitutionally protected activities and using them as leverage to create informants, which has led to the cultivation of terrorist plots smacking of entrapment. Bureau counterterrorism agents, as late as 2011, were instructed that Islam itself and “mainstream” Muslims, rather than specific terrorist plots, were appropriate bureau targets. Tactics like those have sparked overwhelming anger in US Muslim communities that the FBI insists it treats as a partner.

Noting that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev became “angry” and issued an outburst after a January 2013 mosque sermon, the commission suggested the FBI deepen its surveillance of mosques and other Muslim community pillars.

“While the Review Commission recognizes the civil liberties sensibilities of source networks within religious institutions, a more extensive Humint network postured within the local community could have made the FBI aware of these outbursts,” the commission wrote.

Similarly, the commission opted to sidestep the FBI’s close relationship with the NSA, focusing instead on its collaborations with the Defense Department in which the NSA is nested. While it pushed the FBI to expand its cyber activities, it did not address the controversy over Comey’s October call to weaken encryption on mobile devices.

The report praised the modern wellsprings of FBI surveillance authorities, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act – a critical section of which expires in June – and envisioned “expanding” the agency’s power.

“The FBI should ensure Congress is aware of the critical value of these programs as it considers retaining, refining, and expanding the bureau’s authorities as the threat evolves,” the commission advised.

An image of a dangerous world

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, Comey asked lawmakers for more nearly $8.5bn in funding, including “small enhancements” for cyber capabilities and greater integration with other intelligence agencies.

Comey praised his agency’s self-review as a message that “you’ve done great, it’s not good enough”.

“And that is exactly my message to the FBI,” he said. “That’s what it means to be world class – to know you’re good and never, never be satisfied with it.”

The director also presented the lawmakers with an image of a dangerous world in which the FBI faces threats from “homegrown violent extremists in all 50 states” – from the “siren song” of jihadists, from spies trying to steal US secrets, and from dangers that “move the speed of light” across the internet.

He described the agency as playing the position of safety in football, guarding from the rear of the field but useful to law enforcement everywhere: “We have certain assigned coverages, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, non-negotiable, every game, every opponent, that’s our responsibility. But beyond that what I want to do is look to the primary line of defense and say, where do you need us in this game?

“That’s going to be different, in every game and against every opponent,” he said, suggesting that the FBI almost always has a role to play.

Comey also agreed with the commission’s conclusion that the FBI enhance its human and online surveillance – “making sure that we have the sources where we need them to be that we have the capability, both the knowhow and the technical capability, to play in the online space”.

The lawmakers agreed that the agency could well use funding to expand its “preventative” measures of tracking would-be criminals and terrorists.