AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh
The Daily Beast reported last week that “The FBI, without any court order, sifted through the National Security Agency’s massive troves of foreign communications for information on American “racially motivated violent extremists,” even though the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court warned the FBI in 2018 that its warrant-free queries” were unconstitutional. The first question that springs to mind in connection with this is: to whom can we turn when those who are supposed to be protecting us have been thoroughly corrupted and weaponized against the American people? And the second question is: Why are “racially motivated violent extremists” so hard to find that the FBI has to do an illegal deep dive into NSA material to find them?
Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who approved efforts to snoop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, has been appointed to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The same court excoriated government officials in late 2019 for providing misleading information in four applications to surveil Page, who served as a Trump campaign national security adviser.
The surveillance court appointed McCord, who served as assistant attorney general for national security through May 2017, to be an amicus curiae on April 15.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relies on eight amicus curiae to provide advice and expertise on matters related to foreign intelligence collection.
(NSA)
This past Monday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court published its 2020 Report on DOJ’s annual request for reauthorization and certification regarding the collection and use of intelligence information gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That Act authorizes warrantless searches by the FBI of intelligence databases created and maintained by the National Security Agency (NSA). Such searches under Sec. 702 are authorized when the targeted individuals are non-US persons outside the United States such communications do not fall under the protection of the Fourth Amendment.
So, as a general matter, the existence of Sec. 702 searches and their utility to FBI agents conducting investigations into national security threats posed by individuals outside the United States is not a subject of any real controversy.