LOOKING AT YOU

FBI Tripled Warrantless Searches of Data Last Year

A report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows a big jump in the FBI’s use of Section 702 information—but it has an explanation.

The FBI last year tripled its queries of a database containing information collected without a warrant under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a report released Friday. The bureau, which is focused on domestic law enforcement, made nearly 3.4 million queries last year to the FISA database, compared to 1.3 million a year earlier. But a section of the ODNI report offered a few reasons for the sharp increase. “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,” it said. “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. A batch query is when FBI runs multiple query terms at the same time using a common justification for all of the query terms.” It also explained that an idiosyncrasy in the system means that if a single U.S. citizen’s name is included in a search of 100 different terms, and any one of those terms returns a match, it will be counted “as 100 U.S. person queries, even if some of the query terms are not associated with a U.S. person.”