FBI ‘Changes’ Rules Over Using Information From NSA Prism Program

What’s troubling about these new “minimization” rules is that we basically have to take the FBI’s word for it that it is respecting Americans’ privacy. Representatives for the bureau insist that it will closely oversee such activity, but one must ask, who who will oversee the bureau?

‘FBI’s minimization procedures will be updated to more clearly reflect the FBI’s standard for conducting US person queries and to require additional supervisory approval to access query results in certain circumstances,’ the review stated.

‘The reference to ‘supervisory approval’ suggests the FBI may not require court approval for their searches – unlike the new system Congress enacted last year for NSA or FBI acquisition of US phone metadata in terrorism or espionage cases.

Privacy advocates say that this leeway for searches that NSA and FBI officials enjoy is a ‘backdoor’ around warrants that the law should require. In 2013, documents leaked to the Guardian by Edward Snowden revealed an internal NSA rule that Senator Ron Wyden has called the ‘backdoor search provision’, for instance.

While the NSA performs warrantless collection, internal rules permit the FBI to nominate surveillance targets. Those targets are supposed to be non-Americans abroad, but Americans’ data is often swept up in the surveillance.

The legal underpinnings for the dragnet, a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are set to expire this year. A scheduled expiration of the Patriot Act last year gave critical leverage to legislators who wanted to rein in the bulk collection of domestic phone records, and intelligence officials last month implored Congress to reauthorize the measure wholesale.

‘Reasonable people could and did argue about how important the telephone metadata collection was,’ FBI director James Comey told the House intelligence committee last month. ‘This is not even a close call. This is – if we lost this tool, it would be a very bad thing for us.’

Several civil-libertarian legislators have vowed to push for an expiration of Section 702, arguing that it represents a growing surveillance authority that has moved beyond terrorism and espionage, and into the hunt for general weaknesses in the internet. The chief lawyer for the intelligence community, Robert Litt, said in 2014 that the law provides surveillance authorities the powers are ‘not only about terrorism, but about a wide variety of threats to our nation’.

A representative for the Fisa court deferred comment to the administration.”

Source: The Guardian