The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s ruling was made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). According to a judgment announced on Friday, a U.S. court ruled that the FBI inappropriately searched for information in a U.S. database of foreign intelligence 278,000 times over several years, including on Americans suspected of crimes.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s ruling was made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
The searches took place as part of US crime investigations, including the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, according to the court.
Individuals’ digital and other information is stored in the intelligence database. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the FBI to conduct searches without a warrant for communications of foreigners abroad including their conversations with Americans.
The court determined that the FBI’s searches breached guidelines governing the use of the database established under Section 702 of the FISA Act.
The court specifically concluded that searches conducted as part of criminal investigations between 2016 and 2020 breached the guidelines because there was “no reasonable basis to expect they would return foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime,” despite the FBI’s belief that this was “reasonably likely,” according to the judgment.
The findings come as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks congressional backing to preserve Section 702 monitoring powers, which are slated to expire later this year.
The ODNI said the FBI tightened its procedures in mid-2021 and 2022. “As a result, these compliance incidents do not reflect FBI’s querying practices subsequent to the full deployment of the remedial measures,” the office said.
An FBI representative did not reply quickly to a request for comment.