The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' electronic data in 2021.
The search included 1.9 million related to a cyber threat from Russia, according to an annual transparency report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, Apr. 29.
FBI Conducted Warrantless Searches of Data
The transparency report is the first time that the US intelligence community has disclosed an approximate number of the FBI's searches of American data using the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to CNN.
The law focuses on threats coming from outside of the United States. It also follows the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency or the CIA, and others to search data for Americans' Information, providing a validly predicated foreign intelligence purpose.
The transparency report also does not suggest that the FBI acted improperly. Instead, it highlights the big trove of intelligence data that the bureau can use in pursuing terrorists, spies, and hackers.
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Tapping Into Spies and Hackers
According to Wired, more than half of the FBI's queries were connected to the attempts to compromise the critical infrastructure of the United States by foreign cyber actors in early 2021.
According to the transparency report, the FBI found 1.9 million queries that were connected to a cyber threat from Russia against the United States' critical infrastructure.
However, it is unclear what Russian hacking effort the FBI was referring to in the report, and the bureau declined to comment on the matter.
In the first half of 2021, the Biden administration investigated two major cyber incidents in Russia.
The first was the espionage campaign that exploited SolarWinds software to breach at least nine federal agencies. The second one was the cybercriminal ransomware attack in May 2021 that shut down one of the largest fuel pipeline operators in the United States for days.
While the hacking campaign that exploited SolarWinds and other software vendors were aimed at US government agencies, the malicious code that the attackers used was downloaded by thousands of companies.
The companies that downloaded the code included hundreds of electric utilities.
The Biden administration blamed Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service for the SolarWinds campaign, which was discovered in December 2020. However, Russia denied the allegation.
US officials believe that Russian authorities in early 2022 detained the individual or group responsible for the pipeline hack, but it is not clear if the Russians will follow through on prosecuting them.
The number of queries done by the FBI in the report submitted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence does not match the number of people whose data was searched.
Officials can search a person's email address, name, and any other identifier, sometimes multiple times -- all of which would be counted as unique queries.
It is possible that the number of queries of data is lower than the number that was disclosed in the transparency report.
According to the report, sometimes the FBI conducts large queries of hundreds or even thousands of terms. If even one term is linked to an American, every term in the bulk search is counted as a search for an individual in the United States.
On Jan. 8, the FBI warned that hackers mail malicious USB drives to spread ransomware.
On the same date, the FBI allegedly bought the spyware Pegasus.
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Written by Sophie Webster
