A new report suggested that the FBI searched through the data of Americans millions of times last year–all without a warrant.
The Wall Street Journal on April 29 reported that “as many as 3.4 million searches” of data occurred.
The FBI reportedly conducted these searches without warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA), which governs foreign intelligence gathering in the name of protecting national security. This section of the controversial law was renewed in 2018 and is set to expire next year.
“Officials said the FBI’s searches were vital to its mission to protect the U.S. from national-security threats,” The Journal reported. “The frequency of other forms of national-security surveillance detailed in the annual report generally fell year over year, in some cases continuing a multiyear trend.”
Reportedly more than half of the searches sought to discover Russian hackers.
“More than half of the reported searches—nearly two million—were related to an investigation into a national-security threat involving attempts by alleged Russian hackers to break into critical infrastructure in the U.S.,” the report said. “Those searches included efforts to identify and protect potential victims of the alleged Russian campaign…”
The Journal stressed that the number of searches does not necessarily correspond to the number of Americans who had their data searched.
“An individual’s name, telephone number, email addresses and social security number can all be searched, sometimes repeatedly, and each instance of each term would count as a search," The Journal noted. "Searches of U.S. information can pertain to data about U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and U.S. companies. And searches can yield a mix of metadata and content of collected communications.”
Still, privacy experts expressed concern over the warrantless searches.
“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a long-time advocate for personal privacy, said of the searches. “Somewhere in all that overcounting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for nonconsent—numbers that Congress and the American people need before [the FISA statute] is reauthorized.”
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