FBI director asks Congress to renew warrantless surveillance
FBI Director Christopher Wray has asked Congress to renew a controversial law that allows federal law enforcement to conduct warrantless surveillance.
A provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) referred to as Section 702 allows intelligence agencies to conduct targeted surveillance of non-US citizens overseas. Intelligence analysts run specific identifiers about the target through a database, such as a name or email address, and can then collect data on the person’s communications.
But sometimes the analysts use identifiers about US citizens — such as names and addresses — to retrieve communications, called a “US person query.” An FBI agent, for example, could use information about an American taxpayer to search their private communications if they involve a non-US person suspected of foreign intelligence.
Court documents unsealed in May, however, revealed that between 2020 and early 2021 FBI operatives ran 278,000 targeted requests on American citizens through the Section 702 database. Some were targeted “in connection with civil unrest and protests” that were plaguing the country after George Floyd’s death. Others were targeted because of their political affiliations. An FBI analyst ran a batch query on 19,000 Americans who donated to a certain political party because the party was “a target of foreign influence.” Following January 6th, the FBI ran 23,132 search queries on Americans.
Section 702 is due to expire in December, but Wray lobbied lawmakers to reauthorize the law at a congressional hearing last month.
The FBI director specifically asked Congress to block legislation recently introduced by Republican lawmakers that would require the FBI to obtain a warrant before using a US person query.
“I am especially concerned about one frequently discussed proposal, which would require the government to obtain a warrant or court order from a judge before personnel could conduct a ‘U.S. person query’ of information previously obtained through use of Section 702,” Wray said in a statement before Congress.
One of the director’s main concerns was that the law would not permit such requests.
“A warrant requirement would amount to a de facto ban, because query applications either would not meet the legal standard to win court approval; or because, when the standard could be met, it would be so only after the expenditure of scarce resources, the submission and review of a lengthy legal filing, and the passage of significant time—which, in the world of rapidly evolving threats, the government often does not have,” Wray continued. “That would be a significant blow to the FBI, which relies on this longstanding, lawful capability afforded by Section 702 to rapidly uncover previously hidden threats and connections, and to take swift steps to protect the homeland when needed.”
Wray added that “no one more deeply shares” concerns about the FBI’s past “compliance violations” than he.
When FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate was questioned by lawmakers in June about the agency’s 278,000 illegal searches on American taxpayers, he tried to claim they were “unintentional.”
