You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

FBI Abused Mass Surveillance Database to Spy Unlawfully on U.S. Residents

HeadlineMay 22, 2023

Newly published documents have revealed “persistent and widespread” violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by U.S. spy agencies. On Friday, a pair of heavily redacted opinions by the FISA Court were made public, showing that in recent years the FBI misused a foreign intelligence database more than 278,000 times to surveil U.S. citizens. The NSA and CIA also carried out thousands of warrantless queries. Among those targeted were journalists, political commentators, and Black Lives Matter protesters arrested after the killing of George Floyd. The data was gathered under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which permits the mass surveillance of U.S. residents’ digital communications without a warrant, as long as at least one party is a foreign national.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top