Lost in the recent outrage over FBI warrantless spying abuses, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FSIC) has quietly approved a new NSA surveillance program to screen the millions of migrants let into the U.S. under President Joe Biden’s controversial border policies despite acknowledging concerns that “privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment are substantially implicated.”
The FISC ruling released earlier this month garnered significant attention for revealing the FBI, while making some improvements, still conducts between 160,000 and 200,000 warrantless searches of phone data of Americans every year and that three such intrusions involved a U.S. senator, a state senator and a state judge.
But escaping most notice in that ruling was the court’s approval of a major new National Security Agency program that Biden created as the migrant surge at the southern border began in 2021. The new "travel vetting" program allows for warrantless and “suspicionless queries” of raw Section 702 intercepted communications in an effort to quickly vet foreigners trying to get into the country.
The court ruling issued in April and made public July 21 states that the new NSA program was created by national security directives signed by Biden in 2021 and 2022 to help the State Department and Homeland Security Department in “ensuring that applicants do not pose a threat to national security” and to “support the federal government’s vetting of non-United States persons who are being processed for travel to the United States or a benefit under U.S. immigration laws.”