Top FBI official urges agents to use warrantless wiretapping on US soil

A top FBI official is encouraging employees to continue investigating Americans using a warrantless foreign surveillance program in an effort to justify the bureau's spying powers, according to an internal email obtained by WIRED.

Known as Section 702, the program is controversial because it has been misused by the FBI to target American protesters, journalists and even a sitting member of Congress. US lawmakers nevertheless voted in April to extend the program for another two years, while codifying a series of procedures that the FBI says are aimed at stopping abuse.

Obtained by WIRED, an April 20 email from FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate to employees states: To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we must use them, while we holding them accountable to do it correctly and safely. compliance with legal requirements. [Emphasis his.]

Abbate added: I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use U.S. persons-related requests to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that these requests are fully in accordance with the law.

The deputy director's email appears to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but by default, said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat. This directly contradicts previous assertions by the FBI during the Section 702 reauthorization debate.

After publication, FBI spokesperson Susan McKee provided a statement from the bureau that misinterpreted WIRED's reporting, falsely claiming that the FBI had directed its employees to violate the law or FBI policies. The statement added that Abbate's email underscores Congress' recognition of the vital importance of FISA Section 702 in protecting the American people and was sent to ensure that FBI personnel were immediately informed and respects the changes aimed at improving privacy that the law has put in place. .

Authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 702 program allows the government to use U.S. companies to listen to various communications, calls, text messages, emails, and possibly other forms of messaging, all without having need a search warrant. The main requirement of the program is that at least one of the beneficiaries (the targeted individual) be a foreign national who can reasonably be expected to be located elsewhere than on American soil.

In a statement to Congress last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasized that the bureau's goal was to significantly reduce the number of times its agents searched the 702 database for information on Americans.

It is unclear how often the FBI runs U.S. phone numbers or email accounts through the 702 database. The office began making this figure public for the first time in 2021, publishing the total number of times these searches took place. That number was 2.9 million. Since then, the FBI has updated its counting methodology to only count unique searches. (In other words, running the same phone number through the database multiple times per year now counts as one search.) As a result, at least in part, the number dropped to 119,383 the following year. In 2023, under stricter guidelines, this number decreased further, to 57,094.

Do you have any advice? If you have information about the work of the U.S. intelligence community or its congressional overseers, contact Dell Cameron at [email protected] or via Signal at dell.3030.

Last year, a study by the Justice Department found that the FBI's compliance rate hovered around 98 percent, a figure that Wray and other FBI officials have frequently touted in defense of the program. Without knowing the exact number of queries, the number of non-compliant searches is impossible to calculate. At a minimum, the FBI conducted more than a thousand searches in violation of its own policies, which are now law. With its new counting system, this figure could be much higher. Only the Department of Justice knows.

In a statement earlier this year, the FBI claimed that many of these errors were the result of its employees' failure to determine whether a search was actually targeting a U.S. person.

While the 702 program has been widely criticized by privacy and civil liberties advocates, the U.S. House Intelligence Committee is hosting a party Wednesday evening to celebrate the recent expansion of the 702 surveillance program , several sources told WIRED.

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