The Federal Bureau of Investigation may have played a much more extensive role in the National Security Agency’s unwarranted surveillance program than previously thought, according to newly declassified government documents.
Since 2009, the FBI has been gathering raw intelligence data without warrants on foreign surveillance targets—secretly collecting emails and phone numbers through the NSA’s controversial PRISM system and drawing justification for its programs from amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), according to the Department of Justice report.
While unwarranted spying is most often considered to be NSA territory, the Justice Department’s highly-redacted 231-page report—released in response to a New York Times FOIA lawsuit filed by journalist Charlie Savage—shows that the FBI has also been busily expanding its secretive surveillance powers, bolstered in large part by Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
Section 702 allows the unwarranted surveillance of any target “reasonably believed” to be a non-American citizen or located outside of the U.S..
According to the report, the FBI leaned on 702 to approve certain NSA “requests” and route raw data to the NSA and, at times, to the CIA and the bureau itself. In 2008, the FBI granted itself the power to review email accounts that the NSA wanted to target through PRISM; the following year, the bureau went a step further, keeping unprocessed communications acquired without a warrant for its own analysis and internal circulation.
And in 2012, the FBI began taking advantage of yet another NSA program, called “upstream,” which gathers “in-transit” communications jumping between email accounts on different servers.
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