Sometime in late June, exact date unknown, the FBI violated U.S. intelligence laws and attempted to retrieve digital communications (text messages, emails, phone calls, etc.) of Americans arrested at Black Lives Matter protesters.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the electronic communications of foreign individuals outside of the United States, for purposes of national security. But in this case, agents searched for Americans in a database of information obtained exclusively through Section 702.
In 2008, Congress enacted Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to expand the government’s capacity to conduct surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists. The law permits the National Security Agency to acquire the communications of almost any foreigner abroad without obtaining an individualized court order.
Brennan Center
While Section 702 data is not to be used against American citizens, information collected on foreign individuals typically includes communications with American citizens.
The FBI was hoping to find information about 133 individuals “arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests” between May 30 and June 18. It’s unclear whether any information was found.
Two years later, the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Rudolph Contreras, ruled that officials did not comply with the standard for searching the Section 702 repository using Americans’ identifiers. The ruling also revealed that an FBI agent searched the database for 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate in 2020.
In total, Trump’s FBI misused the database on over 300,000 Americans in 2020 and early 2021.
