by ERIC BOEHM
A White House advisory board has recommended that Congress place new restrictions on the FBI’s access to a foreign surveillance tool to prevent the bureau from using it to spy on Americans‘ electronic communications.
That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was intended to track foreign spies and potential terrorists but has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications. In the report published Monday, the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board said the FBI’s use of the databases created by Section 702 should be limited to investigations dealing with foreign intelligence—the same standard that is used at the other intelligence agencies with access to that data.
“FBI’s use of Section 702 should be limited to foreign intelligence purposes only and FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails,” the report recommends. The report says the FBI has made “inappropriate use of Section 702 authorities, specifically U.S. person queries.”
While the full scope of Section 702 data collection remains unknown, there’s no doubt about the FBI’s aggressive use of the database. In 2021, for example, the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database, according to a government transparency report. Separately, a 2021 report from the secret federal court responsible for adjudicating FISA-related matters documented 40 instances in which the FBI accessed surveillance data as part of investigations into a host of purely domestic crimes, including health care fraud and public corruption.
The FBI imposed new internal restrictions on the use of Section 702 surveillance last year, but the new White House report says those changes are “insufficient to ensure compliance and earn the public’s trust.”
Indeed, the public (and Congress) ought to be wary of the FBI’s promises to police itself—and of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISC) ability to hold the bureau accountable. As Reason‘s Scott Shackford detailed in 2021, the FBI had promised the FISC in the wake of the Carter Page scandal that it would change procedures to stop snooping on Americans. The FISA court rubber-stamped those changes.
But the new White House report suggests the FBI is still up to its old tricks with regard to Section 702. As the Associated Press notes, the report details how the FBI used its access to the database to run queries for “a U.S. senator and state senator’s names without properly limiting the search, looking for someone believed to have been at the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and doing large queries of names of protesters following the 2020 death of George Floyd.”
Those latest revelations show that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation simply cannot be trusted with conducting foreign intelligence queries on American persons,” wrote Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy in online communications, last week. “Regardless of the rules, or consistent FISC disapprovals, the FBI continues to act in a way that shows no regard for privacy and civil liberties.”
That’s cute.
As if these agencies will be stopped by a law.
Remember the emails that leaked when the IRS’ Louis Lerner was head of it?
She went back and forth with alphabet agencies about how to “get” conservatives money frozen so they couldn’t help get Trump elected.
The gist of the message was, the agencies would ILLEGALLY obtain something thru NSA’s data center on a conservative group, then share it (also illegally) with the IRS.
Then the IRS would have to run a parallel investigation to “come up with” that same crime, but legally.
The IRS did this to dozens of charities and non-profits, plus quite a few individuals all to freeze Trump out.
There are still terrorists that want to kill us. More so since idiot Biden handed Afghanistan back to terrorists. Foreign governments see weakness and want to tear us apart. We NEED surveillance but, as they usually do, Democrats took FISA, turned it into their own personal spy program, abused it. Now it has to be eliminated, putting the nation in danger.
But even if it is eliminated, what would keep the GESTAPO from continuing to spy on political opponents of the Democrats? The DOJ? Yeah… that’s a laugh.