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Arthur T Knackerbracket and an Anonymous Coward write in with the following story:

A secretive US court has determined that some of the FBI's surveillance activities violated Americans' constitutional rights, newly unsealed documents reveal. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled last year that the law enforcement agency improperly searched an NSA repository for information on Americans, according to the declassified documents.

The court found that the FBI intercepted emails without obtaining a warrant, a violation of Americans' Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.  The FBI appealed the decision to FISA, which affirmed the ruling and issued new querying procedures for the FBI.

Under a new requirement mandated by Congress in 2018, US agencies wishing to search the NSA repository for Americans' data must get court approval for rules covering how they intend to search the database. FBI searches of the database mustn't be overly broad, have an authorized purpose and a reasonable expectation of uncovering evidence of a crime.

The FISA court, under Judge James E. Boasberg, found tens of thousands of queries executed in 2017 and 2018 were unlikely to return evidence of a crime (PDF). In one case, the court found that a contractor ran queries on himself, his relatives and other FBI employees.

As a result, the court found the FBI's querying procedures were "not consistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment."

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded the ruling, saying that the government shouldn't be able to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans' communications without a warrant.

"Any surveillance legislation considered by Congress this year must include reforms that address the disturbing abuses detailed in these opinions," ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani said in a statement. "Congress and the courts now have even more reason to prohibit warrantless searches of our information, and to permanently close the door on any collection of information that is not to or from a surveillance target."

FISC - US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

FISA - US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Also at engadget and National Review.

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