I don’t even work for the FIB and I can see a pattern.
In an October 2018 ruling unsealed and posted on October 8, 2019 by the Office of the Director of Intelligence, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found that the employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had inappropriately used data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FBI was found to have misused surveillance data to look into American residents, including other FBI employees and their family members, making large-scale queries that did not distinguish between US persons and foreign intelligence targets.
The revelation drew immediate outcry from privacy advocates and renewed calls for the termination of FISA and USA FREEDOM Act that authorized bulk intelligence collection. President Donald Trump signed a bill extending Section 702 collection authorizations for six years in 2018; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced earlier this year that the administration would seek the extension of authority for collection of call data granted under the USA FREEDOM Act….
Among those instances of “non-compliance” were:
- Between March 24 and 27, 2017, the FBI ran queries against intelligence data “using identifiers for over 70,000 communications facilities ‘associated with’ persons with access to FBI facilities and systems,” the court noted, “notwithstanding advice from the FBI Office of General Counsel (OGC) that they should not be conducted without the approval of the OGC and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.”
- On December 1, 2017, a redacted FBI division “conducted over 6,800 queries using the Social Security Numbers of individuals” against raw, unredacted FISA data. A week later, the same unit conducted 1,600 queries using another set of identifiers for US persons. The person who conducted the queries “advised he did not intend to run them against raw FISA information, but nonetheless reviewed raw FISA information returned by them.”
- In February of 2018, the FBI searched raw FISA data for information, with about 30 queries regarding “potential [redacted] sources,” and conducted about 45 other queries on people “under consideration as potential sources of information.”
- In an undated event, reported to the Department of Justice’s National Security Division in April of 2018, the FBI ran queries against raw FISA metadata using identifiers for “approximately 57,000 individuals” where it was not clear that the information would return foreign intelligence information.
- Queries against individual US persons were run against the FISA data on a number of occasions, including people about to be served a FISA order—and “a small number of cases in which FBI personnel apparently conducted queries for improper personal reasons—for example, a contract linguist who ran queries on himself, other FBI employees, and relatives.”
The court found a huge lack of oversight over the FBI’s querying of FISA metadata and ordered the FBI to revise its search procedures…
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