From “The National Pulse”
FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate is pushing agency employees to continue using the FISA Section 702 surveillance program to target American citizens. The controversial program was at the center of a heated Congressional debate earlier this year when the FISA program came up for reauthorization. Despite the objections of conservatives and some progressive lawmakers, the foreign salience program and its controversial Section 702 were eventually reauthorized by Congress.
“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,” Abbate wrote to FBI employees. He 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.”
The email has drawn pushback from lawmakers on Capitol Hill over its concerning nature and the appearance that Abbate is pushing FBI agents to spy on American citizens. “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,” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told Wired. She continued: “This directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”
Section 702, established by Congress in 2008, was designed to surveil threats from various hostile actors engaged in cybercrime, drug trafficking, terrorism, and arms proliferation. The program allows government agencies to work with American companies to spy on and intercept communications between Americans without a search warrant. The only controlling requirement is that one of the participants in communication must reasonably be believed to be a noncitizen located outside the United States.