Secret court approves classified rule change on how FBI can use NSA data
On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has changed its rules regarding how it redacts Americans’ information when it takes international communications from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) database. The paper confirmed the classified rule change with unnamed US officials, but details on the new rules remain murky.
The new rules, which were approved by the secret US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), deal with how the FBI handles information it gleans from the National Security Agency (NSA). Although the NSA is technically tasked with surveillance of communications involving foreigners, information on US citizens is inevitably sucked up, too. The FBI is then allowed to search through that data without any “minimization” from the NSA—a term that refers to redacting Americans’ identifiable information unless there is a warrant to justify surveillance on that person.
