Political | Process

An annual report released Friday by the National Intelligence Agency’s office revealed that the FBI had conducted up to 3.4 million searches of U.S. data previously collected by the National Security Agency.

Senior officials of the Biden administration said that the actual number of searches is probably much lower, referring to the complexity of counting and sorting foreign data from US data. The report did not show how much data the Americans had examined by the FBI as part of the program, although officials said it was almost certainly a much smaller number.

The report does not claim that the FBI routinely searched US data incorrectly or illegally.

The publication of these searches is the first time that a U.S. intelligence agency has published, albeit inaccurate, billing of U.S. data by the FBI through part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 Act, which governs some foreign intelligence assemblies. The FISA unit that authorizes the FBI, known as Division 702, will expire next year.

While the ODNI report does not indicate systemic problems with inspections, judges have previously reprimanded the office for failing to comply with privacy rules. Officials said the FBI’s search was crucial to its mission of protecting the United States from national security threats. The frequency of other forms of national security oversight described in detail in the annual report has generally declined from year to year and in some cases has continued the multi-annual trend.

The figure of 3.4 million “is certainly a big number,” the FBI senior official told a news conference on Friday. “I won’t pretend it’s not.”

More than half of the reported searches – nearly two million – were related to a national security threat investigation involving alleged Russian hackers trying to infiltrate critical infrastructure in the United States. The searches included efforts to identify and protect potential victims of the alleged Russian campaign, senior US officials said.