FBI Searched Millions of Americans Without a Warrant Amid Cyberattack Investigations in 2021 [Report]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched millions of Americans without a warrant amid the agency's cyberattack investigations in 2021, a new report finds.

The situation came as court-approved national security surveillance on domestic soil fell for the third straight year last year. It had extended a trend that has coincided with the decline of the Islamic State and the prevalent rise of the coronavirus pandemic along with the tightening of procedures after the FBI's failure to properly wiretap applications in the Trump-Russia probe.

FBI Warrantless Searches

In 2021, there were 376 targets of court-approved wiretaps and physical search orders made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The data comes from a declassified new report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It was estimated that out of the searches, 309 were foreigners on domestic soil and 67 were American citizens, companies, or lawful permanent residents.

The numbers represent the lowest that have been seen in the nine years that the office has released annual reports disclosing figures of the government's use of national security surveillance powers. It comes after the fallout from the 2013 leaks by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, as per the New York Times.

The report notes that the agency made searches of as many as 3.4 million U.S. residents without the use of a warrant over the last year. They were conducted between December 2020 and November 2021. At the time, FBI personnel were looking for signs of threats and terrorists within electronic data.

The increased number of searches came after the FBI made the effort to increase preventive measures against hacking attacks in the country. However, the American Civil Liberties Union called the process an invasion of privacy "on an enormous scale."

According to StarAdvertiser, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, Ashley Gorski, said in a statement that the recent report shed light on the extent of the unconstitutional "backdoor searches." She added that the efforts underscored the urgency of the issue and noted that it was past time for Congress to take a stand to protect Americans' Fourth Amendment rights.

Threat of Cyberattacks

More than half of the FBI's queries were related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors early in 2021. It also includes roughly 1.9 million queries related to one particular cyber threat from Russia against U.S. critical infrastructure.

The bureau declined to comment on the Russian issue and did not disclose what kind of hacking effort the report was referring to. The Biden administration investigated at least two major cyber incidents in the first half of 2021. The attacks, which originated in Russia, were the espionage campaign that exploited SolarWinds software and the cybercriminal ransomware attack in May 2021.

The first was used to breach at least nine different federal agencies while the second was able to shut down one of the largest U.S. fuel pipeline operators, an incident that lasted for several days, causing widespread economic damage, CNN reported.