NSA agrees to release files on abusive FBI spying on 16,000 Americans
The National Security Agency (NSA) has agreed to release records of the FBI’s inappropriate spying on thousands of Americans, the secret agency revealed in a recent letter.
The deal could signal a rift between the NSA and the FBI, according to attorney Ty Clevenger.
Last year, Clevenger filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on behalf of The Transparency Project, a Texas nonprofit, seeking information about the FBI’s inappropriate searches in intelligence databases to obtain information on 16,000 Americans.
The searches violated rules governing the use of the US government’s foreign intelligence information mine, wrote US District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama candidate who currently chairs the Foreign Intelligence Review Court. a memorandum and order of 2019 which was declassified last year.
The FBI insisted that the queries for the 16,000 people “were reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime because [redacted]”, wrote Boasberg. But the judge found this position” unbearable “, apart from searches on only seven of the people.
Still, Boasberg allowed the data collection to continue, prompting Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Freedom and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, to complain this court’s ruling on the data collection program, authorized by section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), “is even more inexplicable given that the opinion was issued shortly thereafter. that the government reported submitting FISA claims riddled with errors and omissions in the Carter document. Survey the pages.
Page was a campaign associate of then-candidate Donald Trump, who was illegally monitored by the FBI.
After the judge’s order was made public, Clevenger filed requests for information about the unreasonable searches with the FBI and the NSA.
The FBI denied the request. In a February letter (pdf), an official told Clevenger that the letter he wrote “does not contain enough descriptive information to allow our records to be searched.”
The NSA initially denied the request, but then appealed the decision, said Linda Kiyosaki, an NSA official, in a letter (pdf) this month.
“You had requested all documents, records and other tangible evidence reflecting the improper surveillance of 16,000 people described in a Dec. 6, 2019 FISC notice,” Kiyosaki wrote.
Clevenger believes the new NSA position signals a rift between the two agencies, potentially because the FBI possesses Many times abused rules governing research intelligence databases when the NSA largely does not have it.
“There was a battle between them, for example Mike Rogers tried to shut down FBI access to the NSA database in 2016,” Clevenger told The Epoch Times, referring to how the ‘Admiral Mike Rogers, the former director of the NSA, prevent FBI agents from using databases in 2016.
“And so there has been some history of the NSA trying to limit access by the FBI because they know the FBI is misusing the intercepted data,” he added.
The NSA and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment.