By Clare Hymes
Washington — The Justice Department's internal watchdog (click here) said a highly anticipated report on the department's use of secret surveillance warrants during the Russia investigation is "nearing completion" and will likely be released publicly, according to a letter obtained by CBS News.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote to congressional leaders on Thursday with an update on his investigation into alleged abuses of warrants obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Horowitz said he expects the report "will be released publicly with few redactions," but declined to provide a timeline.
"I can report to you that the process is ongoing and nearing completion, and we are working through these issues constructively with both the Department and the FBI," Horowitz wrote. "The goal from my standpoint is to make as much of our report public as possible."...
This has nothing to do with the Russia investigation. This is the misuse of META DATA. So, is this the price we pay for surveillance of potential terrorist attacks or not?
October 15, 2019By Nichol Lindsey
According to a new declassified ruling (click here) from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018, was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also a stinging rebuke to the FBI’s overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases.
The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, itself a super-secret court that traditionally approves each and every request of law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, found that employees of the FBI searched data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in an inappropriate and potentially unconstitutional manner. These abuses, says the FISA court, included accessing NSA surveillance data to look into the online communications of U.S. citizens, including fellow FBI employees and their family members. All told, there may have been tens of thousands of these improper queries, all of them carried out without any reasonable suspicion of a crime or illegal activity posing a risk to national security. Moreover, many of the FBI’s backdoor searches did not differentiate between U.S. citizens and foreign intelligence targets.
Simply put, the data was available to search, and the FBI willingly took advantage of every opportunity to query the NSA intelligence database. For example, FBI employees routinely used mass surveillance data to investigate potential witnesses and informants....
...Perhaps the most contentious and controversial section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is Section 702, which went into effect in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America. Under Section 702, it became possible for the NSA to conduct monitoring of online communications involving foreign nationals in bulk....
