The FBI sucks. Government sucks.
Everyone should be furious about this. I don’t want to hear, “Well I don’t have anything to hide.” Let me tell you. The government doesn’t care if you have nothing to hide.
An unsealed document shows the FBI supposedly “misused” a surveillance tool over 270,000 times from May 2020 to January 2021.
The database is Section 702, which is named after the statute that created it:
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. government engages in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ and foreigners’ phone calls, text messages, emails, and other electronic communications. Information collected under the law without a warrant can be used to prosecute and imprison people, even for crimes that have nothing to do with national security.
Section 702 is not supposed to be used against Americans or those in America but the whole thing has always been broad.
Looks like it has information on Americans. This is disturbing. The “misuse” happened with people involved in riots and whatnot after George Floyd’s death in May 2020, those at the capitol on January 6th, and 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.
IN OTHER WORDS: The FBI abuses its powers against everyone except politicians.
The FBI claims it made changes and fixed the problems. It happened due to “a misunderstanding between its employees and Justice Department lawyers about how to properly use” the database.
Okay, bro.
The FISA court has encouraged more changes, though:
The court “is encouraged by the amendments to the FBI’s querying procedures,” Judge Rudolph Contreras of the FISA court wrote in the opinion, which detailed the nearly 300,000 abuses logged between 2020 and early 2021. “Nonetheless, compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread. If they are not substantially mitigated by these recent measures, it may become necessary to consider other responses, such as substantially limiting the number of FBI personnel with access to unminimized Section 702 information.”
Section 702 expires at the end of the year. It should be hard for Congress to justify renewing the database.
But then again. Congress is government.
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