The FBI more than doubled the number of warrantless searches it conducted of Americans' communications data from 2020 to 2021, according to a report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
ODNI pointed out that this year's report is the first to track the FBI's use of "Unminimized Section 702 collection," which is raw data that the National Security Agency collects.
In a Friday press briefing on the report, a senior FBI official said that the 3.4 million figure "Is certainly a large number," the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the report, tracking the precise number of Americans subject to the FBI surveillance is difficult because of how the bureau tracks its Section 702 data, which is different from other federal agencies.
"For reasons discussed more fully below, these statistics are reported separately from NSA, CIA, and NCTC due to unique variations in FBI's data, chief among them that FBI does not count the number of unique query terms, but instead counts the total number of queries, which could include duplicate queries of the same term," the report said.
Oregon Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Friday, "For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans' communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless."Somewhere in all that over-counting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for non-content - numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.
"The FBI must also be transparent about the particular circumstances in which it conducted a staggering 1.9 million additional queries in 2021. Finally, the public deserves to know whether the FBI has fully addressed the extensive abuses of its 702 search authorities that have been documented for years. Baseline transparency is essential if the federal government wants to hold such sweeping surveillance powers."
Saturday, April 30, 2022
FBI warrantless searches of Americans' data more than doubled from 2020 to 2021, ODNI report
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