The head of the House Intelligence Committee is hand-delivering a letter to colleagues on Capitol Hill, demanding they not restrict the FBI’s surveillance power — and citing the recent mass shooting in Orlando as justification. The letter opposes a proposed amendment that would put an end to FBI “backdoor” searches of an NSA database of foreign intelligence without judicial oversight.
“The national security threats to the United States and its allies are greater today than at any point since 9/11. To keep Americans safe, our intelligence community needs to fully employ every tool available to it,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., wrote in the letter obtained by The Intercept, cosigned with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, R-Ga.
The proposed reforms would severely handicap the FBI’s investigations into events like the tragedy in Orlando, they argued. “The intelligence community would not be able to look through information lawfully collected [by the NSA] to see if Omar Siddiqui Mateen, the Orlando nightclub attacker, was in contact with any terrorist groups outside the United States.”
But there’s no indication that the reform would have posed an obstacle for the FBI’s investigation into the Orlando shooter — or that he ever communicated with anyone abroad.
Nunes and Westmoreland are pushing back against changes proposed by Reps. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., to the House Defense Appropriations Bill currently being considered in Congress. Lofgren and Massie have offered similar widely-supported amendments in the past.
They propose to end the practice of FBI agents investigating domestic crimes conducting warrantless searches on the NSA’s database of foreign intelligence collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Proponents of the FBI’s ability to conduct warrantless searches on the database say it’s fine because the data was collected legally — though the surveillance was only directed at foreign targets.
But some Americans’ communications wind up in the database, too.
Critics of those warrantless searches argue that the FBI has other, reasonable options for pursuing investigations into attacks like Orlando.
Given that Mateen explicitly pledged allegiance to several terror organizations, including ISIS, Jahbat al-Nusra, and Hezbollah, getting a warrant to search his emails presumably would not have been an insurmountable problem.
The proposed change would not prevent the FBI from accessing information collected by the NSA — it would just force agents to go to a judge and demonstrate probable cause to conduct the search.
“Nothing in the Massie-Lofgren amendment would prevent the Intelligence Community from querying their database for Omar Mateen’s online communications collected under Section 702 – or under any other FISA authority for that matter,” Lofgren said in a statement emailed to The Intercept.
“The 4th Amendment has kept us safe for over 200 years. Now is not the time to abandon the Constitution,” she concluded.
Read the rest of the letter below:
This is getting old. There is no evidence that NSA surveillance has ever aided a single terrorist investigation. The FBI and the White House have already admitted it, so why bring up this tired, debunked talking point again and again?
@Jenna
“Given that Mateen explicitly pledged allegiance to several terror organizations, including ISIS”
He only pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. And did so by phone. Having the FBI sift through his emails most likely would be fruitless.
Seems like the FBI is trying to turn media attention away from the fact that they had this guy in their cross-hairs and let him go.
This was a failure of not seeing the threat EVEN THOUGH they conducted two investigations regarding this person.
The FBI had interviewed the shooter twice and did an investigation. They don’t need more surveillance of ALL OF US to carry out investigations, especially of suspects already under legitimate suspicion. Unfortunately, violations of our rights of privacy is the one solution that the Dems and Repubs agree on and go to first, and those people, such as Feinstein, need to be promptly removed from Congress by voters. They are a greater danger to our lives than random gun nuts.
Campaign Finance Reform, with mostly publicly funded election campaigns. plays a big part here.
If members of Congress were the full-time “employees” of the American people instead of FT employees of rich campaign contributors (that benefit from violating our privacy) there would be a different motive and different result.
Propaganda at its worst. There are no bounds of morality: any tragedy will be exploited to expand the oppressive powers of the government.
Here we go again. The fear and war mongers will make the most of this tragedy for days to come. They will do their best to place us in a state of fright, which will have us looking for Muslims in the back seat of our cars, around every corner, and under our covers as we enter or beds.
Yes, this terrible loss of life and the many related injuries to our fellow citizens will be used to keep the focus on the enemy without created by a demonic foreign policy of empire, rather than the true enemy within ever increasing its oppression upon the masses including destroying our “4th Amendment rights”.
@Fellow Citizen –
Of course they want us divided and conquered. And so many folks fall for that.
And I can see why you feel somewhat “rebellious” :-)
We so need to come together:
“Divided = Conquered, but United = Empowered!”
They already have everything there is, either legally or illegally. And what good did it do? None. As people like Bill Binney (retired, high level NSA) and others, e.g., Ed Snowden, have said, they collect so much that they can’t find the needles in the haystacks. Their collection should be far more limited and focused and in compliance with the Fourth Amendment and other legal considerations.
@Jerry –
Yes, yes, yes.
Or just dismantle the entire NSA. They’re behaving so badly that’s a good idea.
Well, it didn’t take long for them to start using this terrible tragedy into some excuse to further the surveillance state. It’s enough to make one cynical.
But it seems folks go right to sleep the nanosecond they hear the word “terror.”
Wake up folks. First and Fourth Amendment Rights may be abstract now, but if you wait until your own rights are infringed, it just might be too late.
Yes “cynical” and maybe even rebellious.
“Proponents of the FBI’s ability to conduct warrantless searches on the database say it’s fine because the data was collected legally—though the surveillance was only directed at foreign targets.”
Jenna, let me clue you in on what they really mean by that. They regard the internet cables just across the border as foreign targets. See cryptome.org’s “How US Transnational Fiber Optic Cables Are Tapped”.
For nearly 15 years now, the FBI and other national security agencies at the federal, state and sometimes local levels follow and harass those exercising their First Amendment rights 24/7 365 days per year.
Those agencies have more than enough manpower and money to have kept tabs on this guy – where there is far more suspicion that citizens exercising non-violent speech with no history of violence.
They should not receive another dime until they reverse this mission-creep. They have all of the resources they need.