16 January 2025
In accordance with the Principles of Intelligence Transparency for the Intelligence Community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in consultation with the Department of Justice (DOJ), is making publicly available, with redactions, the 27th and 28th Semiannual Assessments of Compliance with Procedures and Guidelines Issued Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“Joint Assessments”) submitted by the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). These Joint Assessments cover the periods of 1 June 2021 through 31 May 2022. The information discussed in these assessments predates the reforms passed by Congress in the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which became law on 20 April 2024. As a result, none of the information or trends discussed in these assessments reflects implementation of the provisions of RISAA.
About the Joint Assessments
Section 702(m) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended, requires the Attorney General and the DNI to assess the Government’s compliance with the Section 702 targeting, minimization, and querying procedures, as well as the Attorney General’s Section 702 Acquisition Guidelines, at least once every six months. A joint team of experts from the DOJ National Security Division (NSD) and ODNI conduct regular assessments to review compliance and evaluate how agencies that receive unminimized Section 702 collection implement the authority.
NSD and ODNI submit their assessments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), relevant congressional committees, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board through the Joint Assessments. The Joint Assessments describe how those agencies that receive unminimized information acquired under Section 702—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and National Security Agency (NSA)—implement their authority under Section 702, including agencies’ internal compliance efforts, training efforts, and responsive actions to prevent recurrence of compliance issues. The Joint Assessments also include metrics and narratives describing the Government’s compliance with Attorney General Guidelines and with FISC-approved targeting, minimization, and querying procedures. Beginning with the 27th Joint Assessment, NSD and ODNI restructured the Joint Assessments to enhance clarity and readability.
Key Findings of the 27th and 28th Joint Assessments
During the 27th and 28th reporting periods (1 June 2021 through 31 May 2022), NSD and ODNI assessed that NSA, FBI, CIA, and NCTC continued to implement the Section 702 procedures and followed the relevant guidelines in a manner that generally reflects a focused and concerted effort by agency personnel to comply with the requirements of Section 702. NSD and ODNI further assessed that NSA’s and FBI’s consistently low targeting compliance incident rates, and CIA’s and NCTC’s consistently low numbers of compliance incidents, are a result of training, internal processes designed to identify and remediate potential compliance issues, and a continued focus by internal and external oversight personnel to ensure compliance with the applicable procedures.
NSD regularly reviews FBI’s compliance with its query procedures. The FBI query compliance incident rate has historically fluctuated between reporting periods, in part due to the impacts of large batch query incidents, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on NSD’s ability to conduct query reviews. Notwithstanding those fluctuations, over the several years preceding these two joint assessments, NSD, and ODNI had identified FISA queries as a compliance challenge for FBI. Beginning in the summer of 2021 and continuing throughout 2022, NSD, ODNI, and FBI invested significant resources in long-term improvements to FBI query compliance, and data and metrics from query reviews beginning in the period covered by the 28th Joint Assessment indicate that those efforts have yielded significant compliance benefits.
FBI Remediation Efforts
For further information on the FBI’s remediation efforts undertaken in coordination with NSD and ODNI, please review “Recent Efforts to Strengthen FISA Compliance” and “FBI Remedial Measures” publicly available on DOJ’s website.
For additional discussion of FBI compliance trends, please review the 2023 FISC Opinion, which details compliance incidents during a recent certification period, and assesses the strength of the recent remedial measures FBI implemented to bolster compliance with its querying procedures.
For further information on the query reforms required by RISAA, which the FBI has implemented since April 20, 2024, the text of the law is available here.
Additional Information
The 27th and 28th Joint Assessments are posted in full-text searchable format on Intel.gov.