Deeplinks
The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has released its Annual Statistical Transparency Report disclosing the use of national security surveillance laws for the year 2021—and to no one’s surprise it documents the wide-ranging overreach of intelligence agencies and the continued misuse of surveillance authorities to spy on millions of Americans. Specifically, the report chronicles how Section 702, an amendment to the Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), that authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets’ communications, is still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant.
Specifically, the report reveals that between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI queried the data of potentially more than 3,000,000 “U.S. persons” without a warrant.
Although Section 702 is intended to facilitate the surveillance of foreign people who are the targets of national security investigations, the collection of all of that data from U.S. telecommunications and internet providers results in the “incidental” capture of conversations involving a huge number of people in the United States.
But this data isn’t “incidental” to the program’s operation at all. As the transparency report shows, each agency’s “targeting” and “minimization” rules allow access to Americans’ communications caught in the 702 dragnet. And based on the staggering number of times the FBI searches the 702 database using queries related to individual Americans, 702 has become a routine part of the Bureau’s “law enforcement mission.” The IC lobbied for Section 702 as a tool for national security outside the bo
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