Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Court rules FBI surveillance violated Americans’ rights

The Hill – “The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) ruled last year that some FBI surveillance violated the targets’ constitutional rights, the intelligence community revealed Tuesday. The ruling, a rare loss for the government on surveillance matters, found that the FBI may have violated the law, as well as constitutional protections against unreasonable searches, as it searched through databases connected to its a warrantless communications surveillance program. Judge James Boasberg, who sits on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, found last year that the FBI’s efforts to query the sensitive databases and purge unnecessary results were “inconsistent with statutory minimization requirements and the requirements of the Fourth Amendment.” The ruling identified tens of thousands of improper FBI searches of intelligence databases in 2017 and 2018, according to the ruling, which found these searches may have been used to vet personnel and cooperating sources. It also found that the FBI was not properly identifying and documenting which searches were connected to people in the U.S…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.