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FBI Searched the Data of Millions of Americans Without Warrants (bloomberg.com) 35

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The FBI searched emails, texts and other electronic communications of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without a warrant over a year, the nation's top spy chief said in a report. The "queries" were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The surge came as the FBI made a push to stop hacking attacks.

The authority the FBI used in this case was under Section 702 of FISA, which is set to expire at the end of next year unless it's renewed by Congress. The report doesn't say the activity was illegal or even wrong. But the revelation could renew congressional and public debates over the power U.S. agencies have to collect and review intelligence information, especially data concerning individuals. In comparison, fewer than 1.3 million queries involving Americans' data were conducted between December 2019 and November 2020, according to the 38-page report. The report sought to provide a justification for the increase in queries during the last year.

"In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors," according to the report. "These queries, which included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims -- including U.S. persons -- accounted for the vast majority of the increase in U.S. person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year." The exact number of U.S. residents who potentially had their information reviewed isn't known because there's no precise way to measure the data, according to the report.
"Today's report sheds light on the extent of these unconstitutional 'backdoor searches,' and underscores the urgency of the problem," said senior staff attorney with the ACLU. "It's past time for Congress to step in to protect Americans' Fourth Amendment rights."
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FBI Searched the Data of Millions of Americans Without Warrants

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  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:33PM (#62490402) Homepage Journal

    I have tears in my eyes I'm laughing so hard. Congress can't manage to sort out simpler Amendments like the First and Second. And they can't manage to legislate any laws that extend reproductive rights to women, instead relying on Supreme Court rulings to make the decisions for Congress.

    An Amendment that is of deep interest to the Judicial and Executive branches of the government is of almost zero interest to the Legislative branch. There is no money or army of angry voting base pressing them to do something about it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      And they can't manage to legislate any laws that extend reproductive rights

      You mistake the nature of rights. Laws don't "extend" them they protect them. Rights exist as a natural occurrence and governments can only protect them, they can't grant them.

      • Yours is a semantic argument and serves little practical purpose other than to rhetorically introduce a more concrete argument of substance. Such an argument that appears to be missing from your post.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          No, it is an incredibly important point. The entire wording of the US Bill of Rights makes this clear. Governments have to be restrained from trampling the rights of the people. This is a fundamental truth that everyone should bear in mind when dealing with governments.
        • Then your understanding of how rights work needs, um, work. Rights are enumerated, not granted. They are granted by the Creator, not by Man. As an illustration, I have the right to bear arms regardless of whether or not there's a Second Amendment.

          The first sentence of Article I, Section 1 explicitly lays it out: "All legislative Powers herein granted..." In other words, the Governed are granting authorization to the government, not the other way around.

          Interestingly, Madison and others didn't want the first

          • Semantics. All women have the right to terminate their own pregnancy. Some governments put them in prison for it. Let's not quibble over as if this were a high school's government class.

            You're steering way off course because you have nothing else to say. Although I'd much rather read Thomas Paine than James Madison to you if we're having fun with story time.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Not relevent and I would argue mistaken.

        The idea that we have 'rights' at all is an artificial legal construct.

        For example, in my country we have a 'bill of rights'. But our government can pass laws that breech this with a simple majority.
        The Human Rights Commission will release a report on how it breeches them, and then they can choose to ignore it.

        To argue that people have 'natural' rights is a subjective argument. Everyone has different ideas on what rights are.
        Unless enshrined in some sort of constructe
        • I have the right to remain silent, a right which I frequently exercise.

        • > But our government can pass laws that breech this with a simple majority.
          > The Human Rights Commission will release a report on how it breeches them

          If your human rights were decided by the government / politicians, they could simply change their mind and remove those rights. They couldn't breach your rights. If your human rights came from the government, the same government could rightfully take them back. And you'd have nothing to complain about. Heck, the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust would have no reason to complain, if their right to life came from the Nazi government. If it came from the Nazi government, it would be fine for the Nazi government to take it away. But it doesn't. Your right to live does not come from a politician. That's what makes Hitler a bad guy, because the rights were not his to withdraw.

          You CAN meaningfully talk about the politicians and government violating your rights, you can say what they did was wrong, precisely BECAUSE those rights were not created by the government as a favor to you. You have certain rights that are intrinsic to human dignity. That's why government actions can "violate* rights, why they can be *wrong*.

          Which doesn't even require going into the question of where the hell would these politicians get the right to decide what your rights are? The rightful government power is delegated from the people to their representatives. If the people have no rights, they'd not have anything to delegate to the administration.

          • "If your human rights were decided by the government / politicians, they could simply change their mind and remove those rights. "
            They can. So can dictators and military coups. All it takes is enough power. This is the way of the world.

            "our right to live does not come from a politician. "
            I see where the problem is. You have completely missed my point.
            You are free to invent whatever rights you want. Even convince others to agree or find those that already do. But they are your opinion.
            They are thoughts. Unt
            • > Until they are backed with a social construct or power structure they are not 'rights'. No in any practical sense.

              You are confusing rights with powers. That someone has the power to kill you doesn't mean that have the right to kill you.
              Power is a practical thing, a statement of the reality of what someone CAN do. Rights are not descriptive, they are prescriptive. Rights are why although I *could* kill you, it would be *wrong* for me to do so.

              > The Bill of Rights and US Constitution were created by

      • by haruchai ( 17472 )

        "Rights exist as a natural occurrence"
        No. What are called rights are a construct of societies or collectives.

    • by Mononymous ( 6156676 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:41PM (#62490438)

      Yeah, "stepping in" is a weird way to express "reversing their position on this". FISA isn't some kind of accident; it's the clear will of our elected representatives.

    • by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      Not likely they will stop it as it is an increase due to hacking attempts etc that have increased in the last few years to all western countries. The real news here is 3.4 million Americans have been connected to these hacking attempts either as co-conspirators or more likely victims in either case the FBI has a case in continuing its surveillance .
    • There is one thing they are capable of doing:

      set to expire at the end of next year unless it's renewed by Congress

      which should say:

      which in theory should expire at the end of next year except that it's auto-renewed each time by Congress

      We've still got emergency powers in force based on WWI (that's WWI, not WWII) and the Korean War which have been dutifully renewed every time they're about to expire, the one thing you can absolutely guarantee is that Congress will auto-renew this one as well. After all, the Kaiser could rise from his grave at any point and threaten the US again, so we'd better have the emergency powers in force just in case.

  • Abolish the FBI (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rapierian ( 608068 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:34PM (#62490406)
    At this point they're going through the data of Americans without a warrant, investigating parents who show up to the local school boards as potential domestic terrorists, planting child porn on people's laptops, baking up kidnapping plots against governors with stoners... Do we have any reason to trust anything they do anymore?
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      Do we have any reason

      They're very useful when undesirable candidates get elected. How else can we get litteral bullshit legitimized into headlines unless we can find 5688 current and former FBI and intelligence people to claim it's plausible?

  • Encryption? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:43PM (#62490444) Homepage
    Maybe if we started respecting data security and personal information we could stop these mass data collections. The essential issue is that nothing is encrypted, nothing is protected, and companies collect to much information.
    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by slazzy ( 864185 )
      G reportedly gets so many billions from the government for these searches they have trouble laundering it on their balance sheet...
    • Oh no, then we have to put backdoors in the encryption algorithms because "terrorists."

  • by Teun ( 17872 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @04:48PM (#62490458)
    Here I regularly read some don't understand the EU's desire to not have their citizens data stored on US servers or at least have better safeguards for such data.
    This is just more proof the EU is right, the US is not a place for safe data storage.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You think the US doesn't have access to EU data? heh

    • us GOVERNMENT servers are the problem

      If you think the US government is bad ... look at the EU government / governments
  • ... to search citizen data
  • ...the FBI think there are 3.4M terrorists in the U.S.? Is there any reasonable way they can defend that ridiculous number?

    • You just have to take a look at youtube and all those videos from so called first amendment auditors and sovereign citizens and what not. Terrorists, the bunch of them, I tell you! /s
  • by Otis B. Dilroy III ( 2110816 ) on Friday April 29, 2022 @05:43PM (#62490568)
    you had better believe that he is going to use it.
  • by blahblahwoofwoof ( 2287010 ) on Saturday April 30, 2022 @10:09AM (#62491840)

    The referenced PDF was produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. YMMV.

    https://www.dni.gov/files/icot... [dni.gov]

  • When the average person breaks the law there are repercussions, when a Government agency breaks the law there are none, which means they are above the law. If the law has been broken, put people in jail, fire executives do something.

A committee takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom. -- Parkinson

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