BREAKING: Newly obtained email reveals FBI deputy director Paul Abbate encouraged agents to use warrantless wiretaps against American civilians.
According to an email dated April 20 obtained by WIRED, authored by FBI deputy director Paul Abbate to employees: “To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements.” [Emphasis his.]
Abbate added: “I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use US person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law.”
May 16, 2024 · 5:18 PM UTC
According to US representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California: “The deputy director's email seems to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but as a default”
“This directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”
Authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 702 program permits the government to enlist American companies to eavesdrop on a variety of communications including; calls, texts, emails, and possibly other forms of messaging, all without the need for a search warrant. The key requirement for the program is that at least one of the recipients (the individual “targeted”) be a foreigner reasonably believed to be somewhere other than on US soil.
The bureau first began reporting the figure publicly in 2021, releasing the total number of times that these searches took place, with that number being 2.9 million.
Since then, the FBI has “updated its counting methodology” to count only unique searches. (To wit, 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 more stringent guidelines, it dropped further, to 57,094. dni.gov/files/CLPT/documents…
