Based on a recent government report, under the controversial Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA), there has been a steep decline in the FBI’s warrantless searches of U.S. citizens.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) Annual Statistical Transparency Report (pdf) released on April 28, the FBI conducted warrantless searches related to U.S. residents 119,383 times between December 2021 and November 2022, which is a 95.97 percent decline from its 2.96 million searches during the same period a year back. The current numbers are also lower than the 852,894 searches the FBI did between December 2019 and November 2020.
