‘This Is Frightening’: American Lawmakers Torch FBI After A Million Improper Searches – ‘Stop Spying On Innocent Americans’

Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), a member of the House of the Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, expressed serious concern over the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) misuse of the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) process has led toward widespread errors of searches of data and communications of American citizens. Representative Massie took to Twitter to simply write that the FBI ought to “[s]top spying on innocent Americans.”

Stop spying on innocent Americans.https://t.co/B8O68OfuWF

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 28, 2023

His comment was linked to an article by Breitbart on the revelation concerning the FBI. Testimony from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz revealed that effectively one in three FBI searches, 1 million out of 3.4 million searches, authorized under the FISA Act were “conducted in error.” In that same article, Representative Massie argued that “This is frightening, and the FISA program expires this year. … It’s in front of the Judiciary Committee, which Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) chairs and I serve on. So, we can do something about this and we should. I’d just end it, frankly.”

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Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) too expressed concern over this alarming data according to Fox News. He suggested though that the FBI should be prohibited from investigating American citizens. The Ohio representative pitched that a “simple” solution ought to be to “require probable cause if you’re going to query this database on American citizens” and remarked that “How about if we just get the FBI out of the business altogether—what if the FBI can’t query this database? If the FBI can’t query this database on American citizens?”

Representative Jordan had previously commented back in 2022 that “FISA should be allowed to expire” and “major changes” should be made in the Justice Department and FBI. He is on record as saying that “I think we should not even reauthorize FISA (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), which is going to come in the next Congress.”

Representative Jerry Nadler (D-NY), House Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, even shared in these concerns. He remarked that the FBI and other intelligence agencies have “kept us largely in the dark as to how many Americans’ communications are incidentally collected every year” and this alone “should give anyone pause.” He further blasted that such unsavory databases are “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.”

Hopefully, these utterances across the political aisle are not just words but they will be translated into deeds that prevent the reoccurrence of such mass surveillance abuses in the United States.