The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has, in a series of declassified opinions tied to annual Section 702 recertifications, examined how the Federal Bureau of Investigation queries data acquired under the statute when investigators use U.S.-person identifiers. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes targeting of non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located abroad to acquire foreign intelligence. Incidental collection of communications involving U.S. persons is acknowledged in the public record.

According to the court’s published opinions and accompanying government submissions, FBI personnel may query the resulting repositories for evidence of crime or foreign intelligence, including with terms associated with U.S. persons. The court has treated those queries as a distinct compliance problem when they lack a foreign-intelligence or crime-related purpose required by statute and court-approved procedures.

A declassified FISC opinion covering the 2021 recertification, later released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, found that FBI querying practices had produced a large volume of noncompliant U.S.-person queries. The opinion cited examples involving batch queries, queries related to domestic protests, and queries that did not meet the standard then in force. The court directed remedial measures.

Subsequent public reporting by the Justice Department’s National Security Division and ODNI statistical transparency reports showed FBI query counts in the millions in earlier years, followed by sharp declines after policy changes. Officials described the drop as the product of tighter approval rules, training, and system prompts rather than a change in the underlying collection.

In later recertification proceedings, the FISC recorded that the FBI had implemented an opt-in requirement for U.S.-person queries in most contexts, additional supervisory review, and system modifications intended to force a documented justification. A 2023 FISC opinion on the 2023 recertification, also declassified in part, stated that the government had demonstrated substantial progress while noting remaining incidents and the need for continued auditing.

The public docket includes Inspector General and internal compliance findings. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and FBI Inspection Division materials referenced in court filings described instances in which queries were run against 702 data in connection with January 6 investigations, racial-justice protests, and other domestic matters without an adequate foreign-intelligence predicate as then defined. The government characterized many of those events as errors rather than willful misuse.

FBI leadership, in congressional testimony and public statements paraphrased in the record, said the bureau had overhauled query training, restricted default access, and reduced the number of personnel authorized to run certain queries. The bureau has maintained that Section 702 remains essential for counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber investigations and that incidental U.S.-person information is handled under minimization procedures approved by the FISC.

The court has not treated the querying issue as identical to the initial targeting of foreigners overseas. Opinions distinguish collection, which the statute centers on non-U.S. persons abroad, from downstream FBI access for U.S.-person identifiers. Minimization procedures and querying procedures are separate court-approved documents. Violations of the latter have been the focus of the FISC’s recent published criticism.

Congressional reauthorization debates have repeatedly cited the same opinions. Members of the House and Senate intelligence and judiciary committees have pointed to FISC findings when proposing warrant requirements for U.S.-person queries, while the Justice Department and FBI have argued in public filings that a warrant mandate would impede time-sensitive national-security work. Those positions appear in hearing records and committee reports, not in classified annexes claimed here.

Transparency reports issued by ODNI continue to publish annual figures for FBI U.S.-person queries of 702 content, with later years showing lower totals after the opt-in and documentation rules took effect. The reports do not disclose specific targets or the substance of queries. The FISC opinions, when declassified, supply narrative examples that the statistical tables omit.

Budget justifications for the FBI and the Intelligence Community, submitted to Congress, list personnel and information-technology costs associated with FISA compliance, auditing, and systems that log queries. Inspector General work plans have included follow-up reviews of 702 querying. Those documents are part of the public appropriations and oversight record.

The court’s opinions emphasize that compliance is measured against procedures the government itself proposed and the FISC approved. When those procedures were not followed, the court has required reporting of noncompliance incidents, sometimes numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands of queries in a given period before reforms. Later opinions describe a smaller set of remaining incidents after system changes.

No public FISC opinion has found that Section 702 targeting of foreigners abroad is itself unlawful. The documented dispute has centered on FBI access to already-collected data using U.S.-person query terms. The government has argued that such queries are a lawful use of lawfully collected information when they meet the statutory purpose test. The court has required that the test be applied in practice, not merely recited.

Oversight bodies named in the record include the FISC, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Department of Justice National Security Division, and the ODNI Civil Liberties Protection Officer. Their published or declassified products form the basis for the account above.

The recertification cycle continues on an annual basis. Each cycle produces a classified application, a FISC opinion, and, after declassification review, a public version that has repeatedly returned to the querying issue. The public versions do not include the operational details of specific investigations. They do record the court’s assessment of whether FBI querying of U.S.-person identifiers in 702 repositories has matched the rules the court set.