FBI, CIA, NSA, and Other Intel Agency Overstepping

[LFC]

If the FBI and any other intelligence agency wants to have a shred of respect and trust from the American people they have GOT to stop doing this shit. If something needs to happen fast the FISA Court is set up specifically to be able to handle the need for speed. If they can't pull together enough justification then time and again we've seen that they've probably overreacted.

The FBI, without any court order, sifted through the National Security Agency’s massive troves of foreign communications for information on American “racially motivated violent extremists,” a newly declassified order from the secret surveillance court details.

Even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court warned the FBI in 2018 that its warrant-free queries, known as backdoor searches, were constitutionally alarming, the bureau still conducted queries relevant to criminal investigations about, among other things “domestic terrorism involving racially motivated violent extremists.” The court’s Judge James E. Boasberg found what he referred to as “apparent widespread violations of the querying standard.”

That’s the euphemistic term the bureau tends to use to denote white supremacist violence. On one occasion, an FBI analyst ran a multi-search-term “batch query” on Americans “in connection with predicated criminal investigations relating to domestic terrorism” that returned 33 foreign surveillance results.

And not only domestic terror. The FISA Court recounts government acknowledgment that at least 40 FBI searches through the NSA’s warrantlessly collected data involved “health care fraud, transnational organized crime, violent gangs” and “public corruption and bribery.”

On at least one occasion, around May 2020, an FBI analyst looked through the foreign NSA troves “to vet potential source in predicated criminal investigation relating to public corruption.” Seven FBI field offices were implicated in “these and a number of similar violations,” according to a November 18, 2020 FISA Court opinion declassified on Monday and signed by Boasberg.

In other words, the FBI continues to perform warrantless searches through the NSA’s most sensitive databases—the ones the NSA is not required to get warrants before filling with communications information—for routine criminal investigations that are supposed to require warrants.

[LFC]

Two Senators just announced that the CIA is gathering an enormous amount of data with zero oversight.

Two US senators have asked the Central Intelligence Agency to release the details of a secret bulk data collection program that has apparently ensnared Americans.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) wrote the director of national intelligence and the CIA (PDF), asking them to declassify a review of a CIA program known as “Deep Dive II,” the details of which were redacted from their letter. The letter was written in April 2021 but was classified until yesterday.

The secret CIA program is operated under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which former President Ronald Reagan issued in 1981. It has been used to justify bulk data collection of people in the US, including phone calls, SMS messages, and, until recently, email metadata. That practice was limited by a 2015 reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, which banned the bulk collection of phone and SMS metadata by the FBI.

The CIA’s bulk data collection program, the senators wrote, has been “secretly conducted” and is done "outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional, or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection.

“This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress. Until the [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board] report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

[LFC]

The FBI may have provided the justification for tearing down one of the most powerful tools for dealing with foreign crime. They really only have themselves to blame. When you create a culture of "we can do anything we want" then don't whine when you get called on it.

An existential fight over the US government’s ability to spy on its own citizens is brewing in Congress. And as this fight unfolds, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s biggest foes on Capitol Hill are no longer reformers merely interested in reining in its authority. Many lawmakers, elevated to new heights of power by the recent election, are working to dramatically curtail the methods by which the FBI investigates crime.

New details about the FBI’s failures to comply with restrictions on the use of foreign intelligence for domestic crimes have emerged at a perilous time for the US intelligence community. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the so-called crown jewel of US intelligence, grants the government the ability to intercept the electronic communications of overseas targets who are unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.

That authority is set to expire at the end of the year. But errors in the FBI’s secondary use of the data—the investigation of crimes on US soil—are likely to inflame an already fierce debate over whether law enforcement agents can be trusted with such an invasive tool.

Central to this tension has been a routine audit by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) national security division and the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI)—America’s “top spy”—which unearthed new examples of the FBI failing to comply with rules limiting access to intelligence ostensibly gathered to protect US national security. Such “errors,” they said, have occurred on a “large number” of occasions.

A report on the audit, only recently declassified, found that in the first half of 2020, FBI personnel unlawfully searched raw FISA data on numerous occasions. In one incident, agents reportedly sought evidence of foreign influence linked to a US lawmaker. In another, an inappropriate search pertained to a local political party. In both cases, these “errors” were attributed to a “misunderstanding” of the law, the report says.

At some point between December 2019 and May 2020, FBI personnel conducted searches of FISA data using “only the name of a US congressman,” the report says, a query that investigators later found was “noncompliant” with legal procedures. While some searches were “reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information,” investigators said, they were also “overly broad as constructed.”

In another incident, the FBI ran searches using the “names of a local political party,” even though a connection to foreign intelligence was “not reasonably likely.” The DOJ explained the errors away by saying FBI personnel “misunderstood” the search procedures, adding they were “subsequently reminded of how to correctly apply the query rules.” These are the mistakes that will ultimately serve as ammunition in the coming fight to diminish the FBI’s power.

Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s national security program at New York University School of Law, says that while troubling, the misuse was entirely predictable. “When the government is allowed to access Americans’ private communications without a warrant, that opens the door to surveillance based on race, religion, politics, or other impermissible factors,” she says.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 13, 2023 20:48:38 GMT LFC said:

The FBI may have provided the justification for tearing down one of the most powerful tools for dealing with foreign crime. They really only have themselves to blame. When you create a culture of "we can do anything we want" then don't whine when you get called on it.

What stupid people are working for the FBI these days?  Do they not realize that this sort of behavior in dealing with foreign crime feeds those House members that say the FBI is completely corrupt in domestic stuff as well.  That's what the whole weaponization committee is about...how the FBI helped Trump's enemies.