By Cliff Montgomery – June 18th, 2011
By nearly every measure, federal spying increased on American citizens and residents in 2010, stated a recently-released Justice Department (DoJ) report prepared for Congress.
The DoJ study discussed the U.S. government’s use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“During calendar year 2010, the Government made 1,579 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (hereinafter ‘FISC’) for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and/or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes,” stated the April study.
These requests are a noted increase from 2009’s reported 1,376 FISC applications.
It’s an important point, as the Surveillance Court rarely turns down a federal spying request.
In 2010, the U.S. government filed 96 applications to access business records (as well as other “tangible things”) in an effort to ‘discover un-friendly foreign activities in the United States’. This number is a terrific increase from the 21 applications filed in 2009–the first year of the Obama Administration.
One active federal entity has been the FBI. In 2010, the Bureau filed 24,287 National Security Letter (NSL) requests to spy on 14,212 U.S. persons.
That’s also a huge increase from 2009, when 14,788 NSL requests were filed to spy on 6,114 U.S. persons.
Admittedly, the 2010 figures are a good deal below the record-high FISC surveillance requests Americans endured during the Bush Administration. But “there is no indication that intelligence oversight activity and capacity have grown at the same rate,” declared Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, a privately-owned government secrecy watchdog group.
