Top FBI official urges agents to use warrantless wiretapping on US soil

A senior FBI official encourages employees to continue investigating Americans with a warrantless foreign surveillance program in an effort to justify the bureau's spying powers, according to an internal email obtained by WIRED.

Known as Section 702, the program is controversial to have been misused by the FBI to target protesters, journalists and even a member of Congress. US lawmakers, however, voted to extend the program in April for another two years, while codifying a series of procedures the FBI says it is working to stop the abuse.

Obtained by WIRED, an April 20 email written by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate to employees states, “To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we must use them, while we take responsibility for doing it correctly and in compliance with legal requirements.” [Emphasis his.]

Abbate added: “I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to properly use US persons inquiries to advance the mission, with the additional confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that these inquiries are fully compliant with the law “.

“The deputy director's email appears to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but by default,” said U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. “This directly contradicts the FBI's earlier claims during the Section 702 reauthorization debate.”

After publication, FBI spokeswoman Susan McKee provided a statement from the bureau that mischaracterized WIRED's reporting, inaccurately stating that it “alleged that the FBI instructed its employees to violate the law or FBI policies.” The statement added that Abbate's email “emphasized Congress's recognition of the vital importance of FISA section 702 to protecting the American people and was sent to ensure that FBI personnel be immediately aware of the changes the law has made to improve privacy and comply with them in place.”

Authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 702 program allows the government to recruit US companies to listen to a variety of communications: calls, texts, emails and possibly other forms of messaging, all without of a search order. . The key requirement for the program is that at least one of the recipients (the “targeted” individual) be an alien who is reasonably believed to be in a location other than US territory.

In a statement to Congress last year, FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasized that the bureau's focus was to “drastically reduce” the number of times its agents searched the 702 database for get information about Americans.

How often the FBI runs US phone numbers or email accounts through the 702 database is unclear. The bureau began publicly reporting the figure in 2021, publishing the total number of times such searches were conducted. This figure was 2.9 million. Since then, the FBI has “has updated its counting methodology” just to count unique searches (That is, running the same phone number through the database multiple times a year now counts as a single search.) As a result, at least in part, the number dropped to 119,383 the following year . In 2023, under stricter guidelines, it dropped even further to 57,094.

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Last year, a review by the Department of Justice found that the FBI's compliance rate hovered around 98 percent, a figure that Wray and other FBI officials have frequently touted in defense of the program. Without knowing the exact number of queries, it is impossible to calculate the number of non-compliant searches. At the very least, the FBI conducted more than a thousand searches in violation of its own policies, which are now law. With their new counting system, the number could be much higher. Only the Department of Justice knows.

In a statement earlier this year, the FBI said many of these errors were the result of its employees failing to label whether a search did, in fact, target a “United States person.” .

While the 702 program has been widely criticized by privacy and civil liberties advocatesthe US House Intelligence Committee is hosting a party Wednesday night to celebrate the recent expansion of the 702 surveillance program, multiple sources told WIRED.