Action Alert – ODNI Release of FISA Court Review Reveals Alarming Disconnect That Must Be Discussed Before FISA-702 Reauthorization

There is a massive disparity between the number of unauthorized searches conducted and self-reported by the NSA and FBI silos, when compared to the whole of government.  The FISA Court only hears about the NSA/FBI violations, not the unauthorized searches conducted outside the NSA/FBI by people who have access to this database.

How big is the disparity?  HUGE! 

Office of Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified April 27, 2023, that more than 3.4 million search queries into the NSA database took place between Dec. 1st, 2020 and Nov. 30th, 2021, by government officials and/or contractors working on behalf of the federal government. These search queries were based on authorizations related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Within his congressional testimony, OIG Horowitz stated, “Approximately 30% of those 3.4 million search queries were noncompliant,” that is outside the rules and regulations that govern warrantless searches.  The government calls these “non-compliant searches.”  Additionally, IG Horowitz also stated that somewhere north of “10,000 federal employees have access to conduct these searches of the NSA database.”

While DOJ-OIG Horowitz is looking at the entire government, he reports these violations only into the silo of the Dept of Justice.  Horowitz does not report his findings to the FISA Court.  The violations by Horowitz, in this example over a million illegal or “noncompliant” searches, is reported internally to the DOJ (Main Justice).  The DOJ (an information silo) does not turn these findings over to the FISA Court (another information silo).

As a result, the FISC opinion of the database compliance audit is only reached with a limited perspective on the totality of the violations taking place within government.

As a result, the FISC report does not contain discussion of the violations discovered by IG Horowitz.

As a result, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) do not debate the FISA-702 reauthorization with the fulsome scale of the jaw dropping abuse of the database outlined by IG Michael Horowitz.   FISA-702 reauthorization is debated in congress based on the 2023 FISC report which does not include the Horowitz review.

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