On Friday, the FBI released a new transparency report on digital surveillance. In the 38-page document, the agency revealed it conducted upward of 3.4 million searches on Americans’ data without a warrant last year, as part of its surveillance of foreign nationals.
The report is the first time the FBI released statistics on surveillance done under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Nearly 2 million of the searches were related to a cyberattack conducted by Russia against the U.S. The figures are part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s “Annual Statistical Transparency” report.
The report doesn’t state what cyberattack involved the massive amounts of data searches, but could potentially be related to the Solar Winds hack in late 2020.
The searches don’t reflect the number of individuals targeted, but rather the number of searches conducted by the FBI. A person can be on the receiving end of multiple searches.
The data the FBI searched was collected by the National Security Agency, which is tasked with overseas digital surveillance. While the collection of data and searches of it may technically be justified, privacy experts have called the agency’s ability to scoop up searchable data on Americans a backdoor around a requirement for warrants.
In a statement on the release of the report, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) a noted privacy voice on Capitol Hill, called for greater transparency in the report.
“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Wyden wrote in a press release. “Somewhere in all that over-counting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for noncontent—numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.”
Section 702 was passed after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, allowing the government to spy overseas in order to thwart terrorist attacks. Congress renewed it in 2018 despite privacy concerns.