It’s amazing how normalized this practice has become. And how far down the slope we’ve slid. > Civil liberties advocates say the FBI uses Section 702 as a back

It’s amazing how normalized this practice has become. And how far down the slope we’ve slid. > Civil liberties advocates say the FBI uses Section 702 as a backdoor for warrantless searches to get around the courts. I don’t think they argued this originally. Originally we argued that THE SEARCH HAPPENS BEFORE THE QUERY. That moving data into the database constitutes a search. To oversimplify a bit, it’s similar to the government coming into your home every day, taking photos of everything, and inventorying every item. Creating a huge manifest of everything in your home, filing it away with every other manifest they’ve collected on your neighbors, and then claiming they haven’t searched your home because they will only look at the manifest if they think it’s relevant to a qualifying investigation. Every entry in this database _should_ constitute a search. > “Say I want to collect information on Vladimir Putin,” explained Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney, “and I see on his Gmail, it turns out he’s been talking to an American. So I’m collecting on Putin, but it might capture communications with a U.S. person, and so now in that database, I have every email he’s ever sent, and I can go in and query for that U.S. person.” This isn’t exactly accurate either. Last I heard, it was based on “hops.” Not just 1 degree of separation of Vladimir Putin, but N degrees of separation from anyone considered to be a potential “national security threat.” So if your landscaper is sending money back home to their family who is in contact with someone who is involved in a cartel, maybe your entire digital footprint (metadata? more?) is fair game for this database. If you text the owner of your gym and their babysitter’s brother is suspected of being associated with a foreign group, maybe your entire digital life is fair game for this database. The scope of this data dragnet is staggering. > (Though the evidence suggests the FBI was searching for Black Lives Matter protesters as much as Jan. 6 suspects.) The federal court that reviewed how the FBI uses the database threatened to put major limitations on the agency’s ability to use it if the FBI did not change its procedures. I don’t understand how these searches that were illegally conducted aren’t required to be handed over to the defense team for every trial this was used in, along with the records that were returned for their client. Everything downstream of these searches is tainted evidence, no?