Jordan says FBI should be kicked out of probes into US citizens flagged in FISA investigations

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan argued Thursday that the FBI should no longer play any role in looking into American citizens who get flagged during investigations into non-U.S. citizens, in light of evidence that a substantial portion of these FBI “queries” are made in error.

The subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing on how to fix the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and how this law “designed to protect Americans has been weaponized against them.”

Section 702 of FISA allows the government to conduct targeted surveillance of non-U.S. persons located abroad to acquire foreign intelligence information. When U.S. citizens are flagged as part of these investigations, the FBI takes over the process of querying them for possible security reasons.

However, both Republicans and Democrats used the hearing to note that these FBI queries have become a problem. For example, Ranking Member Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said that last year alone, the FBI used “personal identifiers” to query U.S. citizens “nearly 3.4 million times,” while other lawmakers pointed out that up to 30% of those queries were conducted “in error.”

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Nadler also said U.S. intelligence agencies have “kept us largely in the dark as to how many Americans’ communications are incidentally collected every year,” and warned that collection of that data “should give anyone pause.”

“They’re made available to agencies like the FBI, who can search the 702 database for our communications for purposes having nothing to do with national security,” Nadler said, adding that these queries are “neither hypothetical nor rare.”

In the subcommittee hearing, Jordan questioned Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and other witnesses about how many Americans have been queried as part of 702 investigations into non-U.S. citizens, but they said they had no answer.

“And then approximately 10,000 people at the Justice Department have the ability to query this incidental collection database without any probable cause,” Jordan said. “And we know, as Ranking Member Nadler said earlier, there were 3.4 million queries of this database and 30% of those were in error.”

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