Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the federal government to investigate non-US citizens abroad in the interest of gathering foreign intelligence. But if the investigation puts them on the trail of a citizen, they are supposed to turn the case over to the FBI. This is a system that’s been around for a while (FISA was enacted in 1978 at the height of the cold war) and it seemed as if it worked pretty well. Of course, that was before we learned of all of the skullduggery and political interference the FBI has been up to recently.

In any event, the FBI has been investigating a lot of Americans under this pretext lately. Between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI “queried” the names of U.S. citizens nearly 3.4 million times. But the ODNI’s most recent transparency report this week showed that during the same period ending in November 2022, the number of queries plunged to 204,000, a drop of 94%. I suppose they might deserve a cookie for that, but it doesn’t answer the question of why they were going after so many American prior to this. (Fox News)

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said there was a “significant decline” in the total number of queries the FBI made into U.S. citizens between 2021 and 2022 under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

ODNI on Friday issued its annual transparency report on the intelligence community’s use of national security surveillance authorities. The report also outlined the rules designed to “protect civil liberties and privacy and ensure complicate with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

I’m pretty sure they meant to say “compliance with the Constitution” in the excerpt above. But given the subject, it’s a pretty hilarious typo.

So why was the FBI looking into so many Americans to begin with? Let’s get the obvious thought out of the way first. The period in question ran from December 2020 (right after the election) through November 2021. You don’t suppose that massively inflated number had anything to do with January 6, do you? How many of those millions of queries involved people they suspected might have been in Washington that day? (For the record, the number of queries in the year before was also much lower.)

The fact remains that the FBI appears to have been running out of control and people have noticed. They’ve clearly caught the attention of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. During the recent weaponization hearings, Jordan called for an end to the FBI conducting FISA investigations. He pointed out that of those more than three million checks last year, more than 30% of them were conducted “in error” by the Bureau’s own admission. One of those turned out to be Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.).

FISA is scheduled to sunset in December of this year. Congress wants to reauthorize it, but there are members from both parties sounding the alarm about this. One of the things on Jim Jordan’s plate at the moment is the development of a plan to curb some of the FBI’s authority in these areas and provide for increased congressional oversight.

Personally, after everything we’ve learned about the FBI working with social media companies to go after Donald Trump and hide information unfavorable to the Biden family in the run-up to the election, I think we need to do more than that. Any such proposal should wait until the investigations into the politicization and weaponization of the Bureau are complete and any guilty parties have been held to account and replaced. Nothing is going to change unless McCarthy and Jordan force it to change. And the clock is ticking.