WASHINGTON (CN) — A White House panel on Monday recommended that FBI do away with a controversial surveillance law to conduct investigations that aren’t related to national security.
The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board released a 42-page, partially redacted report with several recommendations that the White House hopes will persuade Congress to reauthorize a key portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, first passed in 1978.
Added to FISA several years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Section 702 allows the United States government to collect digital communications of foreigners.
The law will expire at the end of the year unless it is reauthorized by Congress, but lawmakers in both parties are calling for major reforms out of concern the amendment has been used against Americans.
In Monday's report the board said it found “no evidence of willful misuse” of the law by the FBI for political purposes, but noted the Department of Justice identified a handful of incidents of “intentional misconduct” from “millions” of FBI inquiries. Those incidents include searches for people allegedly involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and protestors following the 2020 murder of George Floyd.
Other agencies are privy to the Section 702 database, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, but the scope of access for those entities is limited to foreigners. The board said bringing the FBI in line would not jeopardize national security.
“Because the purpose of Section 702 is the targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, FBI should be able to restrict its use of Section 702 to its originally-intended objective of identifying foreign intelligence information with minimal risk to its intelligence mission,” the board wrote.
The FBI conducts about two dozen inquiries through the program each year, a senior administration official told The Associated Press.
White House officials said the law has been used for investigations of Chinese and Russian espionage, potential terrorist plots and other threats. Officials didn’t commit to taking up the board’s recommendations.
“We agree with the unanimous conclusion reached by this group of independent, deeply experienced experts that failure to reauthorize Section 702 could be ‘one of the worst intelligence failures of our time,’” two of President Joe Biden’s national security advisers, Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, said in a joint statement.
The FBI said in an unattributed statement that the report highlights how Section 702 is “crucial” to national security and “recognizes that the reforms put in place by the FBI have yielded substantial compliance improvements.”
“We agree that Section 702 should be reauthorized in a manner that does not diminish its effectiveness, as well as reassures the public of its importance and our ability to adhere rigorously to all relevant rules,” the statement says.
The board opposed requiring the FBI to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data, saying it would be impractical. It also recommended that the FBI maintain access to foreign spy data because its law enforcement activities can warn Americans if they are being targeted by foreign spies or criminals.
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