National security surveillance dips in U.S.

WASHINGTON— Court-approved national security surveillance on domestic soil fell for the third straight year in 2021, extending a trend that has coincided with the decline of the Islamic State group, the rise of the covid-19 pandemic and the tightening of procedures after the FBI’s botching of wiretap applications in the Trump-Russia investigation.

There were 376 targets of court-approved wiretaps and physical search orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2021, according to declassified data in a new report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report estimated that of those, about 309 were foreigners on domestic soil, and about 67 were U.S. citizens, U.S. companies or lawful permanent residents.

The total number of targets was the lowest yet in the nine years that the office has released annual reports disclosing figures about the government’s use of national security surveillance powers.

As recently as 2018, there had been about 1,833 targets of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act orders. In 2019, that figure dropped to about 1,059, and in 2020, there were about 451.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence began issuing annual reports about its use of surveillance powers after the fallout from the 2013 leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. His disclosures prompted a broad public debate about the scope and limits of government monitoring of communications and data for national security reasons.

The FBI has long said its systems were not set up to provide an accurate count, but this year’s report provided a stab at it. Still, the figure’s significance was murky.

Specifically, the report said FBI analysts had queried the repository using an American’s identifier fewer than about 3.4 million times from December 2020 to November 2021. That is up from fewer than about 1.3 million during the previous 12-month period.

The meaning of those numbers is clouded, however, because of how the FBI compiled them. A batch query that used 100 identifiers as search terms, only one of which was that of an American, would count 100 times.

A search for information about a single American target, using 10 email addresses and phone numbers associated with that target, would count 10 times. Repeating such a query would make all those numbers count anew.