FISA Court Report: FBI Continued to Abuse Surveillance Tool After Trump-Era Abuses

The FBI continued to abuse a powerful digital surveillance tool even after the Bureau promised reforms following its Trump-era abuses, according to a newly-unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document.

The FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times, the Washington Post reported, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.” In one particularly egregious case, they reportedly relied on Section 702 to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.

Section 702 is a provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that “permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, allows National Security Agency and FBI employees a to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information.

The FBI is authorized to search the Section 702 database “only when agents have reason to believe such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes,” according to the Post.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, stated in the memorandum opinion that the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries that violate the requirement that its queries of unminimized Section 702 information be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.”

In the April 2022 opinion, unsealed Friday, the FISA Court’s Judge Rudolph Contreras warned that if the FBI didn’t do better, the FISA court would crack down and order its own changes to the Bureau’s surveillance practices.

The FBI says it has already fixed the problems, which it blamed on a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use a vast database named for the legal statute that created it, Section 702.

But the failures to use the 702 database correctly when collecting information about U.S. citizens and others may make it harder for the agency to marshal support in Congress to renew the law, which is due to expire at the end of this year.

Before the 2022 midterm elections, Rep Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, promised “major changes” to the Justice Department and FBI if Republicans won control of Congress, and said FISA should be allowed to expire.

“I think we should not even reauthorize FISA which is going to come in the next Congress,” Rep. Jordan said in a Fox News Channel interview on October 9, 2022. “At the very least, Congress needs to change the FISA process, Jordan added.

More recently, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) noted in an interview with Newsmax that “we are going to have to take a vote in the Congress to reauthorize the very authorities we saw weaponized in [the John Durham report] and I cannot imagine any Republican voting to reauthorize those authorities.”

In the opinion, Judge Contreras said the court “is encouraged by the amendments to the FBI’s querying procedures,” but noted that “compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.”

The judge added: “If they are not substantially mitigated by these recent measures, it may become necessary to consider other responses, such as substantially limiting the number of FBI personnel with access to unminimized Section 702 information.”

The FISA Court’s report detailed the nearly 300,000 abuses logged between 2020 and early 2021.

READ MORE HERE