FISA Court: FBI Domestic Spying. 278,000 Illegal Searches in 2020-21.
Including spying on 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign.
Since the passage of The Patriot Act these powers and spy tools have been abused almost from minute one during the George W. Bush administration. Again, and again and again the claim has been “oops we were incompetent.” Only a fool would believe that today.
Illegal domestic spying and truly disturbing dirty tricks, including a psy-ops campaign waged against Dr. Martin Luther King in an effort to get him to commit suicide, have been going on since the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
Time and again these spy tools, and other illegal surveillance methods, have been used to violate attorney client privilege, just as it has been revealed accidentally in some of the January 6th trials. It is not just the FBI, other agencies such as the NCIS has used spying tools illegally to spy on attorneys. Of course, it cannot be left out that Trump’s campaign and his attorneys were spied on and continue to be.
These tools are used to target people until they can find something they can be charged with, but instead of telling the court that they illegally spied, they use the spy tools to reverse engineer an evidence trail and lie to the court claiming that had a “confidential informant” or some such nonsense.
Does anyone believe that spying on 19,000 people who donated to a political candidate can in any way be an “oops?”
The declassified FISA Court opinion can be found HERE.
The Register:
The FBI misused controversial surveillance powers more than 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters, January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, and donors to a Congressional campaign, according to a newly unclassified court opinion.
On Friday, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court made public a heavily redacted April 2022 opinion [PDF] that details hundreds of thousands of violations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the legislative instrument that allows warrantless snooping.
The Feds were found to have abused the spy law in a "persistent and widespread" manner, according to the court, repeatedly failing to adequately justify the need to go through US citizens' communications using a law aimed at foreigners.
Section 702 is supposed to permit the federal government to spy on communications belonging to foreign individuals outside of America, theoretically to prevent criminal and terrorist acts. Those communications can sweep up phone calls, texts and emails with US persons, however, and are stored in massive databases. The FBI, CIA and NSA can search these communications without a warrant.
In the doublespeak world of American intelligence, such information isn't technically stored; it's only considered so if it's actually used by analysts. And while foreign communications are fair game, the Feds can search about three levels down in data - ie, who the suspect talked to, and who their contact spoke to, and the next line in the communications link - so think Kevin Bacon levels of contacts.
Although the law is not supposed to be used to surveil American citizens, the government has historically used this data to monitor activists, journalists, and others without obtaining a warrant. These communications can then be used to prosecute people for crimes, and have been.