FIRST ON FOX: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said there was a “significant decline” in the total number of queries the FBI made into U.S. citizens between 2021 and 2022 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
ODNI on Friday issued its annual transparency report on the intelligence community’s use of national security surveillance authorities. The report also outlined the rules designed to “protect civil liberties and privacy and ensure complicate with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”
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Section 702 of FISA allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of non-U.S. persons located abroad to acquire foreign intelligence information. When U.S. citizens are flagged as part of these investigations, the FBI takes over the process of querying them for possible security reasons.
“There was a significant decline in total FBI U.S. person queries in the period December 2021-November 2022,” the report states, crediting a “number of changes FBI made to its systems, processes, and training relating to U.S. persons queries.”
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Between December 2021 and November 2022, the FBI conducted approximately 204,000 queries, a 95% drop from the previous year’s reporting period.
During the December 2020 to November 2021 reporting period, the FBI used personal identifiers to query U.S. citizens nearly 3.4 million times. Testimony by U.S. officials before Congress this week revealed that up to 30% of those queries were conducted “in error.”
“As Director Wray announced during Congressional testimony on March 8, 2023, and what today’s transparency report confirms, in 2022 there was a 93.99% year-over-year drop from the 2021, and an 84.59% drop from 2020,” the FBI said in a statement to Fox News Digital. “This drop in queries demonstrates that the reforms Director Wray established had a substantial effect on the FBI’s querying practices and our continued surgical use of this indispensable tool to protect Americans from foreign threats.”
A query is a “basic analytic step foundational to efficiently and effectively reviewing data lawfully collected and already in the government’s possession.” Queries are conducted by authorized personnel to “more efficiently identify foreign intelligence information and, in the FBI’s case, evidence of a crime.”
Queries can help to “find connections between individuals and entities,” as well as to identify threats to the U.S. homeland or national security interests abroad. Queries also help to identify potential victims of national security threat activity — like possible victims of cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure by foreign actors.
“Queries that return no results may be just as useful as those that do return results because they may sometimes indicate that a person or matter which was believed to be of concern is, in fact, not,” the report states.
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Between December 2021 and November 2022, the FBI’s queries conducted based on evidence of a crime “increased slightly this year.” But the number of instances in which the FBI “failed to obtain a required court order prior to reviewing the results of certain evidence of a crime-only queries declined.”
The report also shows the FBI opened “zero” investigations into U.S. persons who are not considered a threat to national security.
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In December 2022, ODNI declassified a 2021 report that detailed FISA abuses. The report stated that the FBI, under Section 702, searched data for an unnamed member of Congress and local political organizations to determine if they had ties to foreign intelligence.
During a House Intelligence Committee hearing earlier this year, Rep. Darin LaHood, R-Ill., said he believed he was the unnamed lawmaker unlawfully queried by the FBI.
FISA Section 702 is set to sunset on Dec. 31, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are proposing reforms in order to reauthorize the section, with more congressional oversight.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and LaHood, the leader of the bipartisan FISA 702 Working Group, said that “while there was a sharp decline in U.S. person queries from December 2021 to November 2022, it is incumbent upon Congress, not the Executive Branch, to codify reforms to FISA Section 702.”
“Without additional safeguards, a clean reauthorization of 702 is a non-starter,” they said. “The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence launched a bipartisan working group to perform a thorough and comprehensive review of FISA and confront the missteps and inappropriate actions taken by the FBI.”
They added: “We need to pass substantive and meaningful reforms to help deter abusive behavior by the FBI in the FISA process.”
Turner and LaHood said that FISA Section 702 is an “irreplaceable national security tool,” but stressed that Congress “must protect the American people’s privacy and civil liberties.”
House Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, proposed removing the FBI “altogether” from querying American citizens during a hearing this week focused on FISA.
FISA reform became a priority for both Republicans and Democrats following a 2019 review from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. That review found significant inaccuracies and omissions by the FBI in a FISA warrant application to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2016, and has proposed significant reforms to FISA Section 702 since.