FBI conducted improper searches of U.S. officials in foreign surveillance database
CBSN
FBI analysts conducted improper searches on a U.S. senator and two state officials using a foreign intelligence database, according to a declassified court opinion released Friday, despite wide-ranging procedural and accountability reforms the bureau recently instituted to curb possible misuse.
According to an April 2023 opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) released Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the errors related to analysts' failure to properly follow new policies that the FBI put in place for querying data under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a legal provision that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance and is set to expire at the end of this year.
The opinion, written by Judge Rudolph Contreras of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – whose rulings are usually issued in secret – otherwise showed that the FBI's rate of compliance with new standards for searching the database was more than 98%.
