January 22, 2025
From PIME editors, January 27, 2025.
In an important judicial decision of interest to all politically active Americans, a federal court has ruled the government must have a warrant to search communication databases.
According to the ruling, government entities such as the FBI and U. S. intelligence agencies, do not have the right to rummage through databases of Americans’ emails and text messages without a warrant.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed in 1978 was supposed to allow government agencies to collect and analyze information for foreign intelligence threats. In recent years, the federal government has abused its access to phone calls, text messages, and emails and targeted Americans as well as foreigners. With this court ruling, those abuses should end.
Better late than never: last night a federal district court held that backdoor searches of databases full of Americans’ private communications collected under Section 702 ordinarily require a warrant. The landmark ruling comes in a criminal case, United States v. Hasbajrami, after more than a decade of litigation, and over four years since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that backdoor searches constitute “separate Fourth Amendment events” and directed the district court to determine a warrant was required. Now, that has been officially decreed.
In the intervening years, Congress has reauthorized Section 702 multiple times, each time ignoring overwhelming evidence that the FBI and the intelligence community abuse their access to databases of warrantlessly collected messages and other data. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which Congress assigned with the primary role of judicial oversight of Section 702, has also repeatedly dismissed arguments that the backdoor searches violate the Fourth Amendment, giving the intelligence community endless do-overs despite its repeated transgressions of even lax safeguards on these searches.
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