BREAKING: Unlawful FISA Spying Widespread Under Obama Administration Led by Comey’s & McCabe’s Out-of-Control FBI https://t.co/tRNTisCUhY

— Thomas Paine (@Thomas1774Paine) March 15, 2018

The FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA), under the Obama administration, committed numerous violations of procedures intended to safeguard Americans’ personal data and communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Under the section, which was part of amendments to FISA passed in 2008 by then-President George W. Bush, the intelligence community has broad powers to collect internet and telephone data to spy on foreign nationals. Procedures to protect Americans’ data collected under the program were weakened under then-President Barack Obama in 2011, allowing the NSA to search through Americans’ data using their names. Previously, these types of searches, known as “queries using United States person identifiers,” were prohibited. In its ruling in 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) said the “relaxation of the querying rules” would be limited to queries “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information.” The FISC at the time also approved the broader collection of so-called upstream data, which is all internet data traveling through key internet backbone carriers.