Surge came as bureau sought to curb wave of hacking attacks. ACLU calls it invasion of privacy ‘on an enormous scale’. The FBI searched emails, texts and other electronic communications of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without a warrant over a year, the nation’s top spy chief said in a report. The “queries” were made between December 2020 and November 2021 by Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel as they looked for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data legally collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to an annual transparency report issued Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (…) Under unmasking, the DNI reported about 10,700 requests to reveal a U.S. person’s identity in 2021, compared with fewer than 7,000 requests in 2020. Of those requests, agencies approved doing so about 9,800 times in 2021 versus 6,000 in 2020. Intelligence reports normally shield the identity of U.S. individuals whose communications are swept up in surveillance, referring to them as “Individual 1” or the like. U.S. officials can request that actual names of people be provided when necessary, and that’s not unusual as officials try to understand the significance of the information they receive.
via bloomberg: FBI Searched Data of Millions of Americans Without Warrants