Politics Shock - FBI admits to massive abuse of NSA database on daily basis

[TheKiwi]

The FBI routinely misused a database, gathered by the NSA with the specific purpose of searching for foreign intelligence threats, by searching it for everything from vetting to spying on relatives.

In doing so, it not only violated the law and the US constitution but knowingly lied to the faces of congressmen who were asking the intelligence services about this exact issue at government hearings, hearings that were intended to find if there needed to be additional safeguards added to the program.

Rest: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/fbi_spying_abuse/

Highlight for me:

For example, the DNI told Congress that in 2016, the NSA had carried out 30,355 searches on US persons within the database’s metadata and 2,280 searches on the database’s content. The CIA had carried out 2,352 search on content for US persons in the same 12-month period. The FBI said it had no way to measure it the number of searches it ran.

But that, it turns out, was a bold-faced lie. Because we now know that the FBI carried out 6,800 queries of the database in a single day in December 2017 using social security numbers. In other words, the FBI was using the NSA’s database at least 80 times more frequently than the NSA itself.

About time some agency heads did time in maximum security for perjury it seems to me.

 

[BCNTM]

the problem is that if the data is there someone is going to use it

I have in the past worked for the UK National Fraud Initiative building some of the data matching exercises - its not been easy

So data from all Government/Local Government/HMRC/DWP etc. (all held in different formats and systems..............)

As time moves on the quantity of data is actually unbelevable - however the matching results are quite surprising as well

 

[riderboy]

I liked the good old days with J. Edgar Hoover. Simple bribery and extortion for political favors.