Tag Archives: warrantless searches

Congress Needs To Say “No”

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Congress has until April 19th to reauthorize  Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This is the law that allows warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens. It was passed after 9/11 in the hope that it would make America more secure from terrorist attacks. Instead it has been used as a political weapon to move America toward Banana Republic status.

On Monday, The Conservative Review posted an article about Section 702.

The article notes:

The FBI is attempting to rehabilitate the public image of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as Congress has until April 19 to reauthorize it. The bureau recently posted a video to X that features FBI Director Christopher Wray attempting to put a gloss on Section 702 as part of this monthslong campaign.

The bureau’s timely propaganda did not escape the attention of critics on X, where the post received a community note that read, “The FBI violated American citizens’ 4A rights 278,000 times with illegal, unauthorized FISA 702 searches.”

Among the critics was Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who wrote, “FBI just got called out in a community note on X. Congress — take note. FISA 702 has been used for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of times. Yet FBI demands 702 be reauthorized by April 19 WITHOUT a warrant requirement for searches of U.S. citizens.”

“Many in Congress will want to reauthorize FISA 702 — which is set to expire April 19th — either without modification or (more likely) with fake reforms that fail to impose a warrant requirement for searches directed at Americans,” added the senator.

The article notes:

In his March 11 testimony, Wray stated, “The FISA Court itself most recently found 98% compliance and commented on the reforms working. The most recent Justice Department report found the reforms working, 99% compliance. And so, I think legislation that ensures those reforms stay in place but also preserves the agility and the utility of the tools, what we need to be able to protect the American people.”

The FBI’s March 25 social post containing an excerpt from Wray’s testimony was not well-received.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) wrote, “The FBI was correctly called out in a community note for lying about its unconstitutional, warrantless surveillance of Americans. Congress must eliminate FISA abuse and protect the American people’s privacy.”

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R) tweeted, “The FBI has been corrected in community notes and rightfully so.”

FBI whistlelower Steve Friend reiterated that the FBI “violated constitutional rights and abused FISA Section 702 over 278,000 times in a single year.”

The article concludes:

“While only foreigners overseas may be targeted, the program sweeps in massive amounts of Americans’ communications, which may be searched without a warrant. Even after implementing compliance measures, the FBI still conducted more than 200,000 warrantless searches of Americans’ communications in just one year — more than 500 warrantless searches per day,” said Durbin.

Durbin figured this legislation would make reauthorizing Section 702 palatable.

Section 702 needs to go away. We have seen that there is too much temptation for those in power to misuse the law to target their political opponents.

Do You Feel That Someone Is Watching You?

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On Sunday, Townhall posted an article about the number of warrantless searches on American citizens.

The article reports:

In the fiscal year for the U.S. government that ended in November 2021, the FBI conducted more than 278,000 warrantless searches on U.S. citizens.

The information was unsealed in a FISA court ruling this past week.

So on average, during just that one year, the FBI was carrying out as many as 762 warrantless searches per day. That’s 32 improper searches per hour. That breaks down to a new warrantless search every 2 minutes.

These numbers do not include proper searches that used warrants and carried out the usual function of the bureau.

It also does not include the 3,400,000 times the FBI searched citizens’ data without warrants. That’s 9,315 per day, 388 per hour, and 6.5 per minute.

So in 2021–every two minutes—the FBI conducted a physical search and 13 data searches—illegally—for the entire year.

The same agency we now know tipped off that Hillary Clinton was colluding with Russia to frame Donald Trump and did nothing about it…

The same agency that lied to the FISA court to extend search warrants to surveil people that were later vindicated and cleared…

The same agency that allowed agents to conduct extra-marital relationships (an action that violates the FBI code of conduct) and feverishly work to remove a lawfully elected President…

The same agency that has held the Hunter Biden laptop in its possession has chosen to do zero in enforcement….

The same agency that knew that one political party was attempting to smear, frame, and remove an incoming President and briefed then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice-President Joe Biden as to the plans…

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. Unfortunately there is more.

Our Constitution protects us from unlawful searches:

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The people engaged in this unlawful surveillance need to be arrested.

Big Brother Doesn’t Need A Warrant

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On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported the following:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.

An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency.

Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.

The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.

The disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known as Section 702, is due to expire next year.

I think the Republicans need to be very careful about any law they pass that involves searching records, electronic or otherwise. This section of the FISA law needs to be allowed to expire next year. The fuse that began the use of government agencies for political purposes is found in the Patriot Act.

On Thursday, The Conservative Treehouse noted:

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created, and turned those weapons into tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.

The Wall Street Journal article concludes:

“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., Ore.), a privacy advocate, said. “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 Section 702 is reauthorized.”

At a conference later Friday, Matt Olsen, the chief of the Justice Department’s national security division, said agencies were discussing what they could declassify about the use of Section 702 to demonstrate its value. He added that he expected to be able to share more information in the coming months.

The FBI has previously faced scrutiny for its oversight of how authorities plumb Section 702 data, including a rebuke from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2018 that found some searches violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans.

In response, the FBI has imposed new safeguards meant to better ensure compliance. Those include a requirement that all searches involving 100 or more query terms get additional approvals and that analysts actively opt in to search Section 702 data, rather than passively allowing it.

Friday’s report also revealed four instances last year in which the FBI, due to specific factual considerations about a search of data, should have sought approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before performing a search and looking at the content of U.S. communications that were produced.

The FBI has never sought approval from the court since the requirement was adopted in 2018, officials said.

Please follow the links above to read both articles. Big brother is watching all of us.