Secret Court: FBI Warrantless Searches Were Illegal

Some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s warrantless searches through the National Security Agency’s enormous troves of communications data violated the law and the Constitution, according to secret surveillance court rulings partially declassified on Tuesday. The bureau’s so-called backdoor searches, long regarded by civil libertarians as a government end-run around warrant requirements, were overly broad, the court found. They appear to have affected what a judge on the court called “a large number of individuals, including U.S. persons.” On one day in December 2017 alone, the court found, the FBI conducted 6,800 queries of the NSA databases using Social Security numbers. The government, in secret, conceded that there were “fundamental misunderstandings” among some FBI personnel over the standards necessary for the searches. The redacted ruling was kept secret for a year. It represented the latest legal battle over the scope of post-9/11 mass surveillance that affects American freedoms in the name of counterterrorism. The decision highlights the persistent controversy under what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a constitutionally questionable law created to legalize the NSA’s post-9/11 warrantless dragnets for ostensibly foreign communications. Those surveillance dragnets inevitably–“incidentally,” in NSA’s preferred terminology–collect massive amounts of Americans’ communications and associated records. The law currently provides the basis for massive amounts of NSA collections harvested from major tech firms, a program known as PRISM, and in transit across the internet, known as upstream collection. In addition, the NSA, FBI, and CIA can warrantlessly search the vast Section 702 databases for information on Americans, something known as a backdoor search, something they have reported doing at least tens of thousands of times annually. Yet until a recent change, the FBI did not even record how many times it searched through the NSA databases for Americans’ information. Senator Ron Wyden, the intelligence committee member who has sounded the loudest alarms about the backdoor-search provision, said the FISA Court ruling showed that Congress should never have accepted the FBI’s assurance that it was unable to account for its backdoor searches. He also indicated the government was still hiding evidence of wrongdoing. “Today’s release demonstrates how baseless the FBI’s position was and highlights Congress’ constitutional obligation to act independently and strengthen the checks and balances on government surveillance,” Wyden said. “The information released today also reveals serious abuses in the FBI’s backdoor searches, underscoring the need for the government to seek a warrant before searching through mountains of private data on Americans. Finally, I am concerned that the government has redacted information in these releases that the public deserves to know.”..MORE