This may not be an actual “Wyden siren,” but it still has his name attached to it. What’s being said here isn’t nearly as ominous as this single sentence he sent to CIA leadership earlier this year:
I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities.
Few people are capable of saying so much with so little. This one runs a bit longer, but it has implications that likely run deeper than the surface level issue raised by Wyden and others in a recent letter to Trump’s (satire is dead) Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Here are the details, as reported by Dell Cameron for Wired:
In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user’s true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they’re entitled to under the law.
Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, have recommended that consumers use VPNs to protect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they’re seeking.
The letter was signed by members of the Democratic Party’s progressive flank: Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, Edward Markey, and Alex Padilla, along with Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Sara Jacobs.
That’s alarming. It’s also a conundrum. VPN use (often required for remote logins to corporate systems) is a great way to secure connections that are otherwise insecure, like those made originating from people’s homes (to log into their work stuff) or utilizing public Wi-Fi. There are also more off-the-book uses, like circumventing regional content limitations or just ensuring your internet activity can’t be tied to your physical location.
The trade-off depends on the threat you’re trying to mitigate. It’s kind of like the trade-off in cell phone security. Using biometrics markers to unlock your phone might be the best option if what you’re mainly concerned with is theft of your device. A thief might be able to guess a password, but they won’t be able to duplicate an iris or a fingerprint.
But if the threat you’re more worried about is this government, you’ll want the passcode. Courts have generally found that fingerprints and eyeballs aren’t “testimonial,” so if you’re worried about being compelled to unlock your device, the Fifth Amendment tends to favor passwords, at least as far as the courts are concerned.
It’s almost the same thing here. VPNs might protect you against garden-variety criminals, but the intentional commingling of origin/destination points by VPNs could turn purely domestic communications into “foreign” communications the NSA can legally intercept (and the FBI, somewhat less-legally can dip into at will).
That’s the substance of the letter sent to Gabbard, in which the legislators ask the DNI to issue public guidance on VPN usage that makes it clear that doing so might subject users to (somewhat inadvertent) domestic surveillance:
Americans reportedly spend billions of dollars each year on commercial VPN services, many of which are offered by foreign-headquartered companies using servers located overseas. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, VPNs have the potential to be vulnerable to surveillance by foreign adversaries. While Americans should be warned of these risks, they should also be told if these VPN services, which are advertised as a privacy protection, including by elements of the federal government, could, in fact, negatively impact their rights against U.S. government surveillance. To that end, we urge you to be more transparent with the American public about whether the use of VPNs can impact their privacy with regard to U.S. government surveillance, and clarify what, if anything, American consumers can do to ensure they receive the privacy protections they are entitled to under the law and Constitution.
I wouldn’t expect a response from ODNI. I mean, I wouldn’t expect one in any case, but I especially don’t expect Tulsi Gabbard to respond to a letter sent by a handful of Democratic Party members.
A warning would be nice, but even an Intelligence Community overseen by competent professionals, rather than loyalists and Fox News commentators would be hard-pressed to present a solution. To be fair, this letter isn’t asking for a fix, but rather telling the Director of National Intelligence to inform the public of the risks of VPN usage, including increasing their odds of being swept up in NSA dragnets.
Certainly the NSA isn’t concerned about “incidental collection.” It’s never been too concerned about its consistent “incidental” collection of US persons’ communications and data in the past and this isn’t going to budge the needle, especially since it means the NSA would have to do more work to filter out domestic communications and the FBI would be less than thrilled with any efforts made to deny it access to communications it doesn’t have the legal right to obtain on its own.
Since the government won’t do this, it’s up to the general public, starting with everyone sharing the contents of this letter with others. VPNs can still offer considerable security benefits. But everyone needs to know that domestic surveillance is one of the possible side effects of utilizing this tech.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can’t demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to power?
Trump’s first term as president involved the same ridiculous demands for abject loyalty, as well as the ridiculous assumption that subjecting dozens, if not hundreds, of federal employees to (objectively unreliable) polygraph tests would somehow shut down the steady flow of embarrassing leaks.
It didn’t work last time. And since it didn’t, the new Trump administration does what it always does when it has bad ideas: doubles down. The eminently under-qualified head of the FBI, Kash Patel, is using federal money and resources to seek out insider threats. But these “threats” don’t actually put the FBI in any danger. The only thing possibly being threatened is Patel’s self-image.
Since Kash Patel took office as the director of the F.B.I., the bureau has significantly stepped up the use of the lie-detector test, at times subjecting personnel to a question as specific as whether they have cast aspersions on Mr. Patel himself.
In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts. In one instance, officials were forced to take a polygraph as the agency sought to determine who disclosed to the news media that Mr. Patel had demanded a service weapon, an unusual request given that he is not an agent. The number of officials asked to take a polygraph is in the dozens, several people familiar with the matter said, though it is unclear how many have specifically been asked about Mr. Patel.
It’s not just about Patel. Sources report being questioned about things they may have said about Patel’s even-more-unqualified deputy director, Dan Bongino. None of this has anything to do with preventing employees from leaking information that might undermine ongoing investigations. All of this serves a single purpose: the expelling of agents and officials who raise legitimate concerns about FBI directives, as well as the man sitting on top of this whole paranoid mess, Donald Trump.
The FBI is now bleeding talent thanks to Patel’s efforts and general lack of competent leadership.
Top agents in about 40 percent of the field offices have either retired, been ousted or moved into different jobs, according to people familiar with the matter and an estimate by The New York Times, which began tracking the turnover once the new administration arrived.
And, like Nixon himself, Patel has compiled an “enemies” list. Fortunately for Patel, nearly none of the people on his list are still employed by the federal government, which means he can focus on people who say mean stuff about him or Dan Bongino or otherwise undermine his authority by raising questions about his actions or directives.
Patel isn’t alone in his paranoiac behavior. Tulsi Gabbard, who’s even more unqualified for her position than Patel, is in the process of aiming the Intelligence Community’s surveillance tech at any IC employee who doesn’t appear to be an unquestioning drone who spends their free time going MAGA on main.
Gabbard, according to The Washington Post, has “expressed a desire to gain access to emails and chat logs of the largest U.S. spy agencies with the aim of using artificial intelligence tools to ferret out what the administration deems as efforts to undermine its agenda.” In other words, Gabbard is threatening to endanger the careers of loyal intelligence officers by asking an AI if any of them aren’t fully on board with the MAGA cause. She has created a team within her office with the anodyne name of the “Director’s Initiatives Group,” which will collect large amounts of data from across 18 different agencies and run them through AI tools to see whether anyone is engaging in “weaponization” of intelligence. This is a flatly ridiculous, and extremely dangerous, idea.
Even before you get to the point that AI is going to be given the job of spy hunting, you have to wonder why someone who holds the title of “Director of National Intelligence” would think tearing down silo walls and providing a cross-agency blend of internal communications for AI to trawl through would be a good idea. It’s certainly a self-serving idea, which is the sort of thing MAGA officials constantly conflate with “good.”
While this effort may eventually find some people to fire for not being loyal enough (including the false positives who will be considered acceptable collateral damage), it will create an extremely tempting and useful target for malicious state-sponsored hackers. Those who target foreign government agencies to exfiltrate useful information are always thrilled when someone does some of the compilation work for them.
And while Gabbard (and to a lesser extent, Patel) are making America less secure with their efforts, the stuff they should be paying attention to (actual insider threats, terrorists, criminal cartels, state-sponsored hackers) will be ignored… or, at the very least, starved of resources just to ensure this squad of Nixons won’t be kicked around by those in their employ.
The Intelligence Community just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly how badly Donald Trump and his ODNI chief Tulsi Gabbard misrepresented the laughable supposed “invasion” of the US by Venezuelan gangs. And they did it by responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in what may be record time — just six business days.
For context: FOIA requests typically languish for months or years. I’ve personally had requests sit for so long that agencies eventually asked if I still wanted the information. Year-long waits are standard operating procedure, despite the law requiring responses within 20 days.
So it’s notable the Office of the Director of National Intelligence somehow responded to a FOIA request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation in record time earlier this week. The request was sent on April 25th, and the response was delivered on May 5th.
The issue: the Intelligence Community’s report on whether or not (in this case, not) the Maduro government in Venezuela was directing Tren de Aragua actions in the US. As you’ll recall, part of Donald Trump’s “invocation” of the Alien Enemies Act, in order to rendition random Venezuelans to a Salvadoran concentration camp, he had to declare that Venezuela had “invaded” the US. This was obvious nonsense, but here’s what he claimed:
TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela, and commits brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortions, and human, drug, and weapons trafficking. TdA has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus.
In order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, he had to show that a foreign nation had invaded the US. It’s ridiculous on its own to claim that the Venezuelan gang has done much of anything, let alone “invade” the US. Indeed, it’s been shown that the narrative around TdA is mostly a fabrication from NYC Mayor Eric Adams who needed a scapegoat.
But, even if the gang were “invading” (which it is not), that’s still not a foreign nation. So Trump had to claim that Maduro was somehow controlling TdA. Yet, as the Washington Post revealed towards the end of April, there was an assessment by the intelligence community saying that was total bullshit, and there was no clear connection between Maduro and TdA.
This has been obvious all along, and even Trump-appointed judges are calling bullshit on the AEA invocation.
But hearing that the intel community had also rejected this notion was a big deal. Especially since the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, insisted the exact opposite, as pointed out by Marcy Wheeler. After the initial Washington Post report, Tulsi Gabbard put out a tweet screeching about the “illegal leak” that she claimed was “twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite” while simultaneously claiming that the ODNI “fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime.”
So, that leads us to the FOIA request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The standard would be to slow walk this reply. Such a request would normally take a year or so. And yet this response took… six business days. And revealed that contrary to Trump and Gabbard’s claims, the Intel Community could find no real evidence supporting Maduro controlling TdA.
The Intelligence Community’s assessment demolishes Trump’s invasion claims. The key findings:
While Venezuela creates a “permissive environment” for TdA operations and some low-level officials likely profit from its activities, the Maduro regime “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
The IC’s evidence shows Venezuela actually treats TdA as a threat, with law enforcement actively working against the gang. The report notes TdA’s “decentralized makeup” would make any coordinated relationship with the regime “logistically challenging.”
Most damning: “most of the IC judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible.”
The FBI offers one minor caveat: some Venezuelan officials may help TdA members migrate and use them as proxies to “destabilize governments” in several countries. But even this assessment, based on earlier reporting, falls far short of Trump’s claims of state-directed invasion.
As the NY Times notes, this totally undermines the already flimsy claims that Trump had used to make his proclamation in order to rendition people without due process.
The lightning-fast FOIA response speaks volumes about the Intelligence Community’s stance. It’s almost as if they’re not really thrilled with Gabbard and Trump lying about all this. And, as Wheeler separately notes, this also undermines Gabbard’s separate hysterical claims about the supposed “damage” of these “leaks.”
And at a time when Trump’s Administration is falling further behind on FOIA requests, FOPF got near immediate response for its FOIA showing that even if any material in the NYT and WaPo stories was classified, it has since been publicly released. That kind of response only happens when people within an agency want something to be released. And in this case, it means that Tulsi has not sufficiently commandeered ODNI to prevent FOIA professionals to carry out a classification review and release information publicly.
It likely means that the people who leaked these debunkings in the first place have found a way to undercut claims that they committed a crime by doing so. At the very least that will make it hard for the FBI to argue this leak is of sufficient seriousness to obtain warrants and subpoenas targeting journalists. It may even make it impossible for the FBI to claim a crime was committed in the first place, because the FBI will have to prove that the NYT and WaPo stories relied on more than made it into this memo.
While Gabbard will likely try to prevent such rapid responses in the future, this instance shows that at least some parts of the intelligence apparatus are still capable of using transparency to fight disinformation – even when it comes from their own leadership.
Trumpist Republican outrage (most of it manufactured) over being spied on by the US government almost led to significant reforms to Section 702 surveillance powers, specifically the loophole the FBI abuses to search for Americans’ communications in the NSA’s foreign-facing haystack.
But that all got scuttled during the infighting and increasing desperation to just give the Intelligence Community what it wanted without asking too many questions. Some “reforms” were implemented, but the most significant reform agreed upon did nothing more than protect high-ranking government officials from unconstitutional snooping.
For the rest of us, we received something that hasn’t even begun to be implemented yet, apparently because everyone’s just waiting for the 2024 election dust to settle before deciding what parts of this reform move might satisfy their own personal or political interests. Whoever ends up in the White House might decide which direction this finally moves, but for now, the effort is unofficially on hold, as Martin Matishak reports for The Record.
The roster of the “FISA Reform Commission” was supposed to be finalized in July and formally begin work this month to examine the powers granted to U.S. intelligence agencies under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress chartered the panel under legislation enacted in April to extend the controversial Section 702 of FISA for two years, just as those electronic surveillance powers were set to expire.
[…]
The new commission is supposed to feature the No. 2 officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the departments of Defense, State and Justice, and the head of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board — an independent, bipartisan panel of executive branch advisers that monitors the government’s spying and counterterrorism apparatus.
The top four congressional leaders, in consultation with the heads of their respective Judiciary and Intelligence committees, also are supposed to pick three members each to serve on the panel — one lawmaker and two non-members.
Obviously, anything two-thirds staffed by intelligence agency officials is likely going to generate few, if any, actual reforms. But the good news is that the PCLOB was also invited — a creation of previous reforms that has, at times, managed to act as an adversarial force and given the power to dig through existing programs to find constitutional violations.
So, there’s a chance something good could come of this. But it seems like we may never know. The appointments that were supposed to be made by July still haven’t happened. And now that Congress is on semi-hiatus until mid-November, nothing’s going to move forward any time soon. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed that nothing will move forward until the middle of next year, once all the fallout of the presidential election is (hopefully) under control.
But it is instructive to see where at least a little movement has been made. And it hasn’t been on the Republican side of the aisle. Sen. Marco Rubio told The Record that legislators might be waiting around to see who’s going to be in power before moving forward with things. But that uncertainty isn’t preventing long time advocates of surveillance reform from acting, presumably because they want to make things better for all Americans, rather than just do whatever’s better for the new boss (who, in this case, might be one of the old bosses).
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Dick Durbin of Illinois, the chairs of the Intelligence and Judiciary panels, have forwarded names to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Rubio couldn’t recall if he had and it’s unclear if his Judiciary counterpart, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), had done so.
Who else is holding this back? Why, it’s none other than the same party that was so angry about secondhand surveillance it almost managed to prevent the reauthorization of Section 702.
There’s been far less progress in the House.
The lower chamber is home to some of the most ardent supporters of former President Donald Trump, who has railed against the FISA authority for years. At one point in the last renewal debate, he urged members to “KILL FISA” in a social media post, forcing leaders to rush to rework the proposal.
You would think House Republicans would be moving forward with this, considering the man they want to return as president specifically told them to get busy with the fucking up of FISA. But there’s a conflict of interest at play here, so to speak. While Republicans might welcome an opportunity to limit the surveillance powers of a Democratic Party regime, they want to preserve these powers in case their man makes his way back into the Oval Office.
On top of that, most Republicans are fine with extensive surveillance — foreign or domestic — as long as it’s perceived to be spying on foreigners with browner skin, rather than the white Republicans they mostly are.
And as much as politicians love to suggest some problem be handled with yet another committee, panel, or other bureaucratic grouping, they’re far less willing to set aside funding for them, especially if they’re not really sure these groups will draw the conclusions they want them to.
For now, the committee is still little more than a proposal, and an unfunded one at that. Given that the last fight over Section 702 managed to buy the power just a couple more years, perhaps the most realistic expectation is that this project will languish until the next renewal, at which point it might be eliminated completely.
Who among us has not considered shoving a camera into our underwear… but for the greater good… on the public’s dime? No need to raise your hands. We already know where they are.
The only thing better than lots of surveillance is even more surveillance. That’s the unofficial tagline of the Intelligence Community, as headed up by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The IC has its own version of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) called IARPA (the only thing that changes is the “Intelligence”).
The US intelligence community has invested $22 million in a project called SMART ePants, which aims to produce underwear and other garments that help the wearer conduct surveillance operations. Though fully washable, each garment is expected to contain audio, video, and geolocation recording devices.
Yes, they actually called it “SMART ePANTS.” And that’s not the only acronym in play here. Let’s just get the alphabet rolling here. The ODNI press release announcing this IARPA project that puts surveillance in pants — SMART ePANTs, that is — has this to say about the envisioned uses of its proposed surveillance underwear.
The Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems (SMART ePANTS) program represents the largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles (AST) that feel, move, and function like any garment. Resulting innovations stand to provide the Intelligence Community (IC), Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies with durable, ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data. This eTextile technology could also assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.
Lots being said here. Not much of it is coherent. While it may be useful for agencies to track employees during their interactions in “dangerous, high-stress environments,” it seems far more useful for these agencies to have always-on surveillance gear that doesn’t make it immediately apparent to the surveillance targets that they’re being surveilled.
And let’s stop pretending this is about “first responders,” who are usually fire department personnel and/or emergency medical technicians (EMTs). It’s not like these people have been crying out for more passive surveillance options, much less wearable tracking devices with cameras attached. The addition of the phrase “first responders” is supposed to soften the harder edges of the proposed $22 million, always-literally-on surveillance gear by pretending it may occasionally be useful to people mostly uninterested in becoming active or passive participants in government surveillance efforts.
On top of that, it’s unclear how wearable surveillance tech will “assist” personnel and first responders (other than by sending out geolocation data in case everything suddenly goes sideways). The press release gives the impression it might save the lives of professional lifesavers, but never bothers to explain how stuffing surveillance tech into shirts, pants, or underwear will do much more than provide documentation of first responders’ deaths and/or recordings of every interaction they have with anyone they encounter while performing their duties.
At the moment, the project is still just an experiment. But there’s no reason to believe the IC — and the law enforcement agencies who really wish they were anything but cops (you know, like maybe soldiers! or spies!) — isn’t interested in spy gear that can not only be tailored for specific operations, but tailored to fit the operative wearing them.
For the first time in a long time, the Intelligence Community is facing an uphill battle to getting one of its most invasive surveillance powers renewed. Not even during the heyday of the Snowden leaks has the IC seen this much resistance to a clear reauthorization of its Section 702 program.
This surveillance grabs everything it can from internet backbones, providing the NSA (and the FBI) with tons of data and communications. It’s a foreign-facing collection, so it’s not generally subject to constitutional restraints. But it does collect a bunch of US-based communications when US residents communicate with foreign persons.
Because of this, the NSA has made a series of mostly halfhearted efforts to reduce its “incidental” collection of US persons’ communications. It doesn’t appear to be able to reduce this over-collection by much. And the FBI is the primary beneficiary of this “incidental” collection.
The FBI has access to the NSA’s Section 702 collections. But it’s not generally supposed to be able to target US persons’, even if the collection allows that to happen. Since its inception, the FBI has never not abused its access to these collections to perform warrantless searches of US communications, even though the Fourth Amendment strictly forbids this.
The FISA court, which oversees foreign surveillance, has often criticized the FBI’s abuses. It has also ordered the FBI to alter its tactics to bring itself back in line with the Constitution. None of this has done much to alter the way the FBI does business. Until last year, FBI searches of 702 collections increased year over year. Its abuse of its search privileges has, for the most part, tracked with its increased access.
A recently released order from the FISA court only adds more ammo for congressional reps already inclined to let Section 702 expire. Jordain Carney has more details at Politico.
An FBI analyst improperly searched a government surveillance database last year using the last name of a U.S. senator, according to a newly declassified court document released on Friday.
The disclosure is included in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of a 117-page April order by the federal judiciary’s foreign intelligence surveillance court, which typically issues rulings in secret. The surveillance court’s ruling notes more broadly that, despite the improper search in 2022, “there is reason to believe that the FBI has been doing a better job” adhering to its own rules for using warrantless surveillance.
This is, unfortunately, what we’ve come to expect from the FISA court. While acknowledging the FBI continues to repeatedly abuse this access to perform warrantless searches targeting US persons, the FISA court has regularly refused to sanction or otherwise limit the FBI’s access. Instead, it criticizes the FBI’s actions — often couched in exculpatory language like the “FBI has been doing a better job” seen above — before allowing it to continue to engage in Section 702-enabled constitutional violations.
For whatever reason, Politico has decided it can’t publish the publicly available FISA court order [PDF] along with its coverage of the decision. But anyone with a bit of internet can easily find it at the ODNI’s “IC On The Record” site, which routinely posts declassified court orders and other information related to the IC’s work.
The order — delivered to the IC in April but only recently made public — opens with this dour, but accurate, assessment of the FBI’s Section 702 activities.
The FBI has not consistently complied with the three-part querying standard articulated by the Government.
No surprise there. That’s been well-documented, and not just by the court that continually forgives the FBI’s perpetual trespasses. That’s followed by a tacit admission the court simply isn’t capable of controlling the FBI.
The Court expected that a requirement for FBI personnel to document their basis for believing that a query using a U.S.-person query term satisfied the querying standard before accessing Section 702-acquired contents information retrieved by the query would help ensure that they recalled and thoughtfully applied the guidance and training they had received on the standard.
Ever the disappointed parent, the court notes the FBI took this directive and turned it into something ineffectual. (Emphasis in the original.)
As revised, the procedures require “FBI personnel to provide a written statement of facts showing that the query was reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime” and the FBI to maintain records of such statements of facts “in a manner that will enable oversight by NSD and ODNI.” But the primary means of implementing those requirements is for FBI personnel to select from a pre-set menu of broad, categorical justifications, not to prepare a case-specific explanation of why the standard is met for a particular query.
And that’s how the FBI adds to its own Section 702 reauthorization woes. If analysts are able to apply blanket rationales for backdoor searches, sooner or later, the FBI is going to be caught snooping on people who actually have the power to terminate the FBI’s access to these collections, as well as end the collections themselves. Back to Carney and Politico:
According to the newly declassified court document, in June 2022, an FBI analyst conducted four searches of information collected under the warrantless surveillance program “using the last names of a U.S. Senator and a state senator.” In both cases, the analyst had information showing that the two lawmakers were being targeted by a foreign intelligence service.
Rep. Darin LaHood (Illinois) has stated he believes he’s the one who was targeted by these apparently illegal searches. The FBI has yet to confirm or deny this. The released opinion possibly confirms this assertion, but there’s no way to tell because the court and the ODNI have collaborated to redact any information that might identify which US person was improperly targeted.
And that’s ridiculous. Lots of information about the Section 702 collection (what it does, where it collects from) has been made public. So has plenty of information about the FBI’s continual abuses. And yet, information that would provide the public with new information about abuses of government power has been withheld, which means this release only confirms what we already know.
The black-bar truncation of this order has provoked at least one representative to complain about this unnecessary opacity. Senator Ron Wyden — who has always been willing to call out the government for protecting itself at the expense of the governed — released this statement on his official website:
“For years, as government officials have provided misleadingly narrow testimony about who is targeted under Section 702, I have pushed to get the government to come clean. The revelation that 702 is used against ‘foreign governments and related entities’ directly impacts Americans’ privacy, as American journalists, businesspeople, students and others all have legitimate reason to communicate with foreign governments. The fact they can be swept up in 702 collection further highlights the need for reforms to protect their privacy.
“While I commend the administration for these releases, it remains the case that information the public needs in advance of 702 reauthorization has been unnecessarily redacted.”
The government shouldn’t be allowed to hide pertinent details from the public. But it does so constantly. And because the public (and their representatives) are forced to work with incomplete information, they’re not able to contradict misleading statements by IC officials or know who has been affected by the FBI’s constant abuse of its Section 702 access.
Wyden’s statement doesn’t just refer to the order reported on by Politico. It also refers to the declassified documents involving Section 702 that were released by the ODNI along with the court order. These detail acquisition and access, but only in as much detail as the government believes we, the people, should be privy to. And that’s what Wyden is calling out: the redaction of any information that might help the public understand why the FBI abuses its power so frequently, as well as why it has yet to be prevented from abusing this access dozens — if not hundreds — of times a year.
Story after story after story has showcased how the intentionally convoluted adtech and data broker market sloppily traffics in all manner of sensitive consumer data, whether it’s your daily physical movements (say, the last time you visited an abortion clinic), your granular browsing habits, your medical history, your household energy use patterns, or even your mental health data.
This massive trove of data is then used to categorize and classify Americans on an increasingly complicated array of criteria in a bid to sling ads and sell products online. Companies collect way more consumer data than is needed, it’s simply not secured in any competent way, and while adtech brokers will happily claim they “anonymize” this data to protect consumer privacy, study after study have showcased how that word is absolutely meaningless, providing flimsy cover as the sector sells access to datasets relatively cheaply, often without competently screening the purchaser.
In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system’s cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.
The report is also quick to note what everybody has known for a long time: claims that industry “anonymizes” this data to protect consumer identities are generally bullshit, since it’s relatively trivial to identify users with just a modicum of additional data. “Anonymization” is tossed around casually as some kind of ethical and privacy get out of jail free card, when it’s simply gibberish:
It is no secret, the report adds, that it is often trivial “to deanonymize and identify individuals” from data that was packaged as ethically fine for commercial use because it had been “anonymized” first. Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What’s more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”
Sure, wholesale corruption and greed is a major reason why it’s 2023 and we still haven’t passed even a baseline privacy law for the internet era and competently regulated data brokers. But it’s also because holding the data broker and adtech space for lax privacy and security practices operates in stark contrast to the interests of those keen on mindlessly expanding our domestic surveillance apparatus:
Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”
That’s why the often performative policy fixation on TikTok — and the pretense that banning TikTok actually fixes the broader problem — are naïve baby talk. It’s also a giant (often intentional) distraction from the real problem: our corrupt inability to pass even basic privacy legislation or regulate a data broker market that’s been running amok for the better part of two decades.
You’ll see endless hyperventilation in DC about China and TikTok, yet those same folks will curiously avoid discussing how domestic intelligence is also able to obtain this same data on the cheap. And they’ll avoid it because they don’t actually care about privacy, but they do care about making money and mindlessly expanding U.S. government surveillance power as it tramples accountability underfoot.
The Freedom of Information Act was enacted 55 years ago. To its credit, it has resulted in an unprecedented amount of access to documents and communications created by federal agencies.
But there has been a lot of resistance. Government agencies continue to abuse FOIA exemptions to withhold documents that shouldn’t be withheld. These efforts far too often force FOIA requesters to spend their time and money suing the government to obtain information that never should have been withheld.
That’s the backend opacity efforts the government deploys. On the front end, the government routinely classifies documents it would rather not release, whether or not the info contained is too sensitive to be handed over to the general public.
Many agencies — especially those that rub elbows with national security concerns — consider classification the default option. Once a document is classified, not even litigation will pry it loose. Documents can remain classified for decades, far exceeding the time period where the contained info might pose operational issues if made public.
But over-classification doesn’t work as well as certain government agencies and officials think it will. Sweeping massive stacks of innocuous paperwork under the classification rug may make FOIA request denials more routine, but it also encourages whistleblowers to leak documents containing information they believe the public should be made aware of. The government hides while FOIA requesters seek, but the more it hides, the more likely it is the wrongfully hidden documents will be leaked to journalists.
Even intelligence agencies have begun to recognize the downside of being too secretive. But that realization hasn’t stopped the over-classification of documents. And, despite admitting over-classification can often be counterproductive, agencies continue to resist presidential and congressional directives meant to limit abuse of document classification powers. According to a report from the DOJ Inspector General, executive branch agencies engaged in 95 million classification decisions in 2012 alone, most of those presumably finding in favor of opacity.
Fortunately, there are a couple of new sheriffs in town. President Joe Biden is sitting on top of the executive food chain with the power to change the way document classification is handled. To this end, Senators Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran have asked [PDF] the new president to update Executive Order 13526 — issued by Barack Obama in 2009 — to expedite the declassification of documents. This order created the National Declassification Center, something meant to address the declassification backlog, something created by decades of over-classification by agencies far more interested in secrecy than serving the public’s interests.
The other new sheriff in town is Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines. Unlike far too many of her predecessors, Haines agrees that over-classification and its attendant opacity is a problem. Because of Wyden and Moran’s willingness to press this issues, the Biden Administration and the new DNI will be overhauling the current — and currently broken — classification process.
In response to the joint Wyden-Moran letter, Director Haines announced a White House-led process to update the Executive Order, noting the Intelligence Community’s full support for the process and committing to including the views of Congress, advocacy organizations and academic partners. Additionally, Haines shared efforts currently underway within the Intelligence Community (IC) to improve the declassification process.
The changes are detailed (and somewhat redacted) in DNI Haines’ response to Wyden’s questions. The NSA will be working to automate some of the declassification process, utilizing software to make recommendations for potential declassification based on NSA rule sets. Once recommended by the software, documents will be reviewed and stripped of personally identifiable information before being made available to the public.
The CIA will engage in the same process, although it appears its implementation of automation will lag behind the NSA’s implementation. In both cases, the DNI expects improvements to start being shown sometime next year, with full rollout by the NSA expected later in 2023. The CIA’s program is expected to trail the NSA implementation, but the letter does not specify how far behind that implementation will be.
This is good news, especially if the projects remain on target. Unfortunately, it trails years of intelligence agencies recognizing the problems of over-classification but deciding it was a net gain for opacity to continue to over-classify documents. Large leaks of classified info by whistleblowers was apparently considered an acceptable tradeoff for increased opacity. Reversing years of standard opacity procedure is a big ask, but this appears to be a step in the right direction — one with at least a couple of power executive branch supporters.
Eight years ago, prompted by the Snowden revelations (and Senator Ron Wyden’s persistent questions), then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper finally provided the public with some insight into the FBI’s warrantless searches of Americans’ data collected (supposedly inadvertently) by the NSA.
The report delivered to Sen. Wyden was surprisingly redaction-free. But that didn’t mean it was filled with specifics. Clapper’s report was vague. And it was vague because the FBI deliberately made sure no one could say for sure how many warrantless searches of US persons’ data it performed.
The FBI does not track how many queries it conducts using U.S. person identifiers.
But if DNI Clapper (and the FBI) had to guess, it would be a lot.
Moreover, because the FBI stores Section 702 collection in the same database as its “traditional” FISA collection, a query of “traditional” FISA collection will also query Section 702 collection. In addition, the FBI routinely conducts queries across its databases in an effort to locate relevant information that is already in its possession when it opens new national security investigations and assessments. Therefore, the FBI believes the number of queries is substantial.
An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency.
Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.
The report [PDF] offers a couple of explanations of the year-to-year increase in searches (jumping from 1.3 million in 2020 to 3.4 million in 2021). According to the FBI, some of these warrantless searches of Americans’ data was done to protect the same Americans being searched.
Particular to calendar year 2021, there were two factors that contributed to significant fluctuations throughout the 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. 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 other explanation offered says that the number of searches could have been even higher if the FBI hadn’t changed the way it handles these searches.
Separately, in June and August, FBI made several changes to systems that store unminimized Section 702-acquired information designed to ensure compliance with FBI’s Section 702 querying procedures. Specifically, FBI added an additional approval process for batch queries involving 100 or more query terms. FBI also modified two important systems that allow FBI to query across multiple datasets to require FBI personnel to affirmatively “opt-in” to querying unminimized FISA Section 702-acquired information. Following these changes, the average monthly number of FBI U.S. person queries run against unminimized Section 702-acquired collection decreased.
This appears to show that once the FBI decided to engage in a little oversight, the end result was fewer searches. Once analysts had to answer to someone, they perhaps engaged in less abuse of the search process.
There are smaller numbers scattered throughout the report that may be less immediately eye grabbing, but are more concerning than the 3.4 million searches. The ODNI identified four instances in the last year the FBI performed searches requiring a FISA court order but did not bother to obtain one. This may seem like a small number of searches, but considering the fact thousands of records can be accessed with a single search (which includes batch queries of up to 100 search terms), the number of Americans whose data was accessed with a court order could be very large.
There were also 12 instances where the searches of the 702 collection were performed solely to obtain information for criminal cases with no apparent national security nexus. That’s not what the 702 collection is supposed to be used for, and the DOJ notes it is continuing to “assess” these searches, possibly in hopes of finding something national security related that will allow them to be justified after the fact. And, again, it’s only a small part of the 3.9 million Section 702 searches but could also have impacted hundreds of US persons.
Finally, the report shows the FBI still really likes using National Security Letters to obtain information about US persons. The FBI did this more than 12,000 times last year, at a rate of nearly 38 per day. And, as has been documented here, the FBI will use its self-issued NSLs to seek data when it’s been rebuffed by the FISA court. How many of those requests can be linked back to request FISA requests will probably never be known.
The good news is that this is the most transparent the FBI and the ODNI have been in relation to FBI searches of data collected by the NSA. The questions raised by this report will hopefully result in more hard questions from congressional oversight, which should then lead to further policy changes and more granular reporting of the FBI’s searches of Americans’ data.
