© CPO Magazine
According to a new declassified ruling from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC),
FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018,
was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been
abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also
a stinging rebuke to the FBI's overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases.
Key elements of the FISA court ruling
The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
itself a super-secret court that traditionally approves each and every request of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, found that employees of the
FBI searched data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in an inappropriate and potentially unconstitutional manner. These abuses, says the FISA court, included accessing NSA surveillance data to look into the online communications of U.S. citizens, including fellow FBI employees and their family members. All told, there may have been
tens of thousands of these improper queries, all of them carried out without any reasonable suspicion of a crime or illegal activity posing a risk to national security. Moreover, many of the FBI's backdoor searches
did not differentiate between U.S. citizens and foreign intelligence targets.
