Mass surveillance

A DECLASSIFIED COURT RULING SHOWS HOW THE FBI ABUSED NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE DATA


THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE Surveillance Court found that the FBI may have violated the rights of potentially millions of Americans — including its own agents and informants — by improperly searching through information obtained by the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program.

U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, who serves in the District of Columbia and the FISA court, made his sweeping and condemnatory assessment in October 2018 in a 138-page ruling, which was declassified by the U.S. government this week.

To longtime critics of the government’s mass surveillance program, the FBI’s abuses are confirmation that federal law enforcement agents are combing through the communications of Americans without warrants, in violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“These opinions reveal devastating problems with the FBI’s backdoor searches, which often resembled fishing expeditions through Americans’ personal emails and online messages,” said Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “But the court did not go nearly far enough to fix those abuses. The Constitution requires FBI agents to get a warrant before they go combing through our sensitive communications.”