Jacquelyn Martin/AP
From left, Chris Fonzone, General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, George Barnes, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, David Cohen, Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Paul Abbate, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Matt Olsen, Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, was sworn in before testifying at a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing to examine Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and related surveillance authorities, Tuesday, June 13, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
CNN
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Senior Biden administration officials on Tuesday announced new disciplinary measures to prevent further abuse by the FBI under a controversial surveillance program that will expire at the end of the year unless renewed. or it in Congress.
A new “three strikes” policy at the FBI would have analysts disciplined, or even fired, for three incidents in which they abused the intelligence program, Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate told the Senate. Judiciary Committee.
The program, known as Section 702, allows authorized US officials to search a vast database that gathers phone calls and text messages to foreign targets abroad from telecommunications providers in US. The data may include communications of Americans related to foreign targets.
The new FBI disciplinary measures are a response to heated criticism of the FBI from lawmakers from both parties after recently revealed examples of the FBI using foreign intelligence tools to find American information.
U.S. officials and many lawmakers agree the program is vital to U.S. national security, but recently revealed abuses have complicated reform of the program and sharpened concerns in Congress about the lack of civil liberties protections.
“I still have to see [reforms]” than the Justice Department presented to the committee in the past two years, said Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the committee.
The FBI improperly searched a Section 702 database for information on suspects in the January 6, 2021, riots at the US Capitol and people arrested in 2020 protests following the police killing of George Floyd, according to in a court opinion that was unsealed and released last month.
Abbate and other senior officials from the CIA, National Security Agency and Justice Department made the case to lawmakers that, in the two years since those abuses, drastic reforms have been made to the process. approval and procedures for finding data.
The abuses are “completely and completely unacceptable, and they do not reflect the high standards that we seek to hold ourselves to at the FBI,” Abbate told lawmakers.
Abbate and other senior officials touted the importance of Section 702 in thwarting assassination plots, tracking drug traffickers and recovering millions of dollars in ransom payments from foreign cybercriminals. Most of the intelligence that appears in President Joe Biden’s daily intelligence briefing comes from the program, officials said.
But lawmakers from both parties responded with a mix of support for the program’s goals and an insistence that more safeguards for civil liberties are needed if the program is to be reauthorized.
The bitter partisan political climate and Republican attacks on the FBI also complicate the revision of Section 702. During the hearing, Republicans Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn made lengthy criticisms of the FBI and accused the bureau that did not do enough to investigate the businesses of the president’s son Hunter Biden. Abbate declined to comment on matters of investigation and strongly defended the bureau’s work as nonpartisan.
“By releasing more examples of how Section 702 has proven useful in disrupting terrorist plots and recovering ransom payments, the government has done a good job of convincing most members of Congress that law needs to be rewritten,” Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the NSA, told CNN.
“But that’s only half the battle; the other half is convincing Congress that the FBI can be trusted,” Gerstell said.
