Court rules FBI’s warrantless searches violated Fourth Amendment
It's official: The FBI's warrantless searches of communications seized to protect US national security have at last been ruled unconstitutional and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In a major December ruling made public this week, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall settled one of the biggest debates about feared government overreach that has prompted calls to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for more than a decade.
Critics' primary concern was whether the FBI needed a warrant to search and query Americans' communications that are often incidentally, inadvertently, or mistakenly seized during investigations of suspected foreign terrorists.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group that has long said a warrant is needed to conduct such invasive searches, celebrated the ruling as "better late than never." The EFF noted that the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US persons' 702 data in 2021, describing it as a "routine practice" and calling out Section 702 as a "finders keepers" rule that for years has seemingly given feds' unfettered access to many Americans' private and sensitive communication data.
DeArcy Hall agreed with an appeals court that ruled that "the government cannot circumvent application of the warrant requirement simply because queried information is already collected and held by the government," as the US unsuccessfully tried to argue.
