As privacy-oriented lawmakers continue waging their war to rein in government surveillance abuse, there have been several startling revelations about the government’s abuse of surveillance laws.
FreedomWorks and Demand Progress have aggregated some of the most egregious instances of intelligence agencies abusing Americans’ privacy:
- “[T]ens of thousands” of baseless searches “related to civil unrest” in a one-year period.
- including 141 racial justice protestors and thousands of January 6 suspects.
- Searches for individuals an NSA analyst had met on an online dating site, and a prospective tenant.
- Searches for a state court judge who reported civil rights violations to the FBI.
- Searches for places of worship that were intentionally hidden from oversight.
- Searches for a member of HPSCI and a U.S. senator.
- A “batch” search for 19,000 Congressional donors.
- “Batch” searches that included current and former federal government officials, journalists, and political commentators.
- Searches for people who came to the FBI to perform repairs.
- Searches for victims who came to the FBI to report crimes.
- Searches for business, religious, and community leaders who applied to participate in the FBI’s “Citizens Academy.”
- Searches for college students participating in a “Collegiate Academy.”
- Searches for family members and colleagues.
- Searches for police officer candidates.
- Searches for an individual employed by a defense attorney.
- Searches for a wrongly accused American academic.
- Searches based on a witness’s report that two men “of Middle Eastern descent” were loading cleaning supplies into a truck.
- Searches for a local political party.
- “Batch” searches for 1600 Americans “who had flown through an airport during a particular date range and were either traveling to or returning from a foreign country”
- 2,000 searches for “the names and dates of birth of individuals who were registered competitors in an athletic event.”
WATCH —Rep. Andy Biggs: CDC Purchased $420K Worth of Data to Surveil Americans During the Coronavirus Pandemic:
U.S. House of Representatives
Conservatives, progressives, and libertarians aim to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial surveillance law.
Section 702 is a law that allows intelligence agencies to collect communications of targeted foreigners. It also may lead to targeted surveillance of Americans’ private communications, which privacy advocates consider a run around of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a warrant to search Americans’ communications. The law will expire at the end of 2023.
Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which contained a provision that would temporarily extend Section 702 through April.
WATCH: Jim Jordan: There are 204K Reasons to Oppose FISA Reauthorization:
House Committee on the Judiciary / YouTube
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.