(USNewsMag.com) – A recently disclosed court document claims the FBI inappropriately collected information on above 278,000 American people by using a massive database.
The Section 702 database, overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which may be seen by the FBI and the NSA. But the FBI can only see the database with evidence to believe it contains foreign intelligence material.
According to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, the FBI often disobeys the government’s three-prong requirement.
According to Contreras, the lack of consensus on what constitutes a requirement for an inquiry to be sufficiently probable to provide evidence of foreign-intelligence criminal activities or relevant data was highlighted by the Court as a significant factor in the FBI’s non-compliance.
The court’s judgment described the nearly 300,000 violations recorded in 2020 and 2021.
According to Contreras, one FBI agent made 23,132 individual inquiries about supposed Americans after the incident on January 6, 2021, looking for signs of foreign interference relating to the query word.
A report from the Judiciary Committee in the House and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government cites information from a whistleblower who claims the FBI manipulated the way it categorized investigations related to January 6 to promote a false narrative that showed domestic terrorism is on the rise across the nation.
Typically, the FBI assigns a case number and description based on the location of the first field office and then passes along relevant leads to additional field offices for further investigation. That said, the FBI did not follow standard operating procedure with the January 6 cases, which would have had the Washington Field Office (WFO) take the lead and classified the investigations as their WFO cases.
As noted by Contreras, there is a pervasive and long-standing issue with compliance when the FBI queries Section 702 data. Other actions, such as significantly reducing the amount of FBI workers with unlimited access to Section 702 material, may become essential if they are not considerably reduced by these recent efforts.
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