The FBI is no stranger to controversial programs that can eavesdrop on individuals worldwide, including on US soil. The agency has once again landed in hot water after its deputy director, Paul Abbate, urged employees to continue using illegal surveillance tools from a program called Section 702 in an internal email.
The Section 702 program has previously been wrapped in controversy for being misused by the FBI to target US protestors, journalists, and even a sitting member of Congress. Regardless, lawmakers voted to extend the program for another two years in April and implemented a new set of procedures that the FBI claims will stop the program’s abuse.
The internal email, obtained by Wired, from Paul Abbate comes after a debate over Section 702’s reauthorisation. Abbate writes: “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.”
Section 702 was authorised under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and allows the US government to hire American companies to tap into a slew of communications modes including, but not limited to, calls, texts, emails, and messaging without needing a search warrant. The main requirement is that at least one person involved in the tapped conversation must be a foreigner reasonably believed to be somewhere other than US soil.
We don’t know how often the program is used, either. The FBI first began publishing the number of US phone numbers or email accounts run through the 702 database in 2021, which came out to be 2.9 million. However, FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress in 2023 that the bureau was focussing on reducing the number of times the 702 database is accessed by agents for information on American citizens.
Since then, the bureau changed its counting methodology only to include unique searches, meaning running the same phone number or email address through the database multiple times counts as one search. This changed way of counting meant that the reported search figure dropped dramatically to 119,383 in 2022 and even lower to 57,094 in 2023 under stricter guidelines.
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