A report released by the US National Intelligence Directorate this Friday afternoon (29) fueled concerns about state surveillance and the privacy of citizens.
The document reveals that the FBI, the US federal police, carried out 3.4 million data searches, without a court order, with the name of Americans, from December 2020 to November 2021. The figure is more than double that observed. in the previous 12 months —1.3 million.
The searches fall under the umbrella of the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, which allows the government to collect emails and other communications from foreigners abroad from companies like Google, including when they communicate with US citizens. Privacy experts say the measure allows civilians’ personal information to pass through the sieve.
FBI officials claim that the figure does not match reality due to problematic settings that do not allow for an accurate count and always oversize it. It is said, without further details, that the jump in the last period is due to a specific investigation, when information emerged that hackers from Russia were trying to compromise American infrastructure.
Criticism was not long in coming. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, for example, said through his staff that the FBI failed to explain the spike in information from Americans searched.
“To anyone, the astronomical number of searches is highly alarming and doesn’t make any sense,” said the politician, who is a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“The public deserves to know whether the FBI has addressed issues related to the extensive abuses committed under Section 702 and documented for years,” the Democrat continued. “Transparency is essential if the federal government is to have such comprehensive surveillance powers.”
Authorizations of this type were approved in the country in the years following the terrorist attacks of 11 September. But it was years later, in 2014, that the National Intelligence Directorate began issuing annual reports on the use of surveillance powers by the security services.
The push came with the leak of documents promoted by former National Security Agency technician Edward Snowden showing the surveillance system developed by Washington.
On the other hand, the same report showed that national security surveillance on American soil dropped for the third year in a row. Only 376 wiretaps and search and espionage orders were approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the last year, the majority against foreigners. This figure, in 2018, was 1,833.
Among others, the reasons behind the fall, according to a report by The New York Times, are the decline in the performance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group – an operation led by the US was the stage for the death of a leader of the group, who it was already replaced, in February—, the Covid pandemic and the hardening of internal procedures after the FBI’s failure to investigate possible Russian interference in the American elections.
Director of Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency at the Directorate of National Intelligence, Ben Hubner, drew a parallel between the two main factors in the document. “If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that people can work from home; and we’ve also seen that in the national security space,” he said, according to The Washington Post.
Hubner argued that as many of the foreign intelligence targets continued their activities operating outside the US, the number of eavesdropping and face-to-face searches, of course, decreased. Data surveillance – the one in the scope of Section 702 – continued to increase.
