Electronic surveillance

FBI and NSA violated surveillance law or privacy rules, a federal judge found

Two of the nation’s largest surveillance agencies repeatedly violated either the law or related court orders in incidents reported last year despite training on the procedures set up to protect the privacy of U.S. persons, a federal judge found.

The FBI flouted the law and the National Security Agency ignored a rule to safeguard civil liberties when these agencies gathered or searched emails and other communications gathered from U.S. tech and phone companies, under a statute designed to produce foreign intelligence, ruled Judge James E. Boasberg, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in a significant opinion made public Friday.

“It should be unnecessary to state that government officials are not free to decide for themselves whether or to what extent they should comply with court orders,” Boasberg wrote in the December 2019 opinion.