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Source: Congress.gov
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The committee will come to order without objection. The chair is authorized to declare recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The chair recognizes the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Nels, to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. thank the gentleman for uh leading us and sorry to hear his recent announcement he's not gonna be running for re-election but glad to have him with us here today um we'll start with opening statements and we'll get right to our witnesses and to uh today's uh hearing uh february 2nd 2021 the fbi was given i believe the I think it was just then when we were in the minority, just minority staff and members, a briefing on the 702 program. And I remember that in that briefing, I can't remember who asked the question, but one of us asked the question, how many agents, how many people at the FBI have access to the 702 data? The data that's collected in this database, surveilling foreigners, but all kinds of people get swept up, all kinds of Americans, US persons get swept up in this. How many agents, how many people at the FBI can query, which I always point out as a fancy name for search, how many people can search this data?
We then said, how many queries we found out we had the IG do a, do a, uh, uh, study and investigation. How many queries are these 10,000 agents potentially 10,000 agents doing? who have access to this information, how many are they doing on U.S. persons? And that answer from the IG was 3 million, 3 million in one calendar year, 2021. The IG also told us that 278,000 of those searches on U.S. persons were most definitely done in an improper way. And what that meant by improper is they didn't follow the rules Congress had set, they didn't follow the FBI rule, so they didn't follow our rules, and they didn't even follow their own rules when they were doing these unbelievable millions of searches, 278,000 definitely done improperly, and the potential of 10,000 people at the FBI to do those very searches. And who were they searching? But who are some of the people they searched? Well, the IG told us this as well. Journalists, people, a part of Black Lives Matter, members of Congress, 19,000 political donors, ex-girlfriends. I mean, you could, it was as obnoxious as you could, You can imagine. And again, we're just talking about the 702.
We all know the problems with Title I, some of the things we learned a few years ago relative to surveilling a presidential campaign. We all know about that. We're just talking about 702. But all this is coming up, as everyone knows, for reauthorization. 702 program for reauthorization, but we can address the Title I as well. All that's coming due here in just four months. And so we felt it was important to have this hearing where we begin to talk about some of the things that still need to be done. I want to back up a second and say this. Last Congress, I do think the good work of this committee, some of our members working closely in a working group with members of the House Intelligence Committee, I do think we had some good reforms that got put into the bill last Congress. And a lot of that's due to the work of our witnesses here and the groups that they represent. And we appreciate that. We codified procedures to reduce improper queries. Last year, the number was down to 9,000 queries on U.S. persons. So important changes that were made to the 702 program safeguards protecting Americans' liberties. And of course, some changes also made to the Title I section of the FISA law as well. I know our ranking member knows this. I know every member of this committee knows this. We're the Judiciary Committee where we're supposed to be focused on protecting the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the liberties that we enjoy as Americans. We think it's important as we move forward
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