emptywheel

1) NSA defined "dissemination" as serialized intel reports. In doing so it avoided the most egregious forms of US person sharing, back door searches of raw data and data retained from entirely domestic comms collected off Tor etc.

2) No one dealt with 704/705b, which had egregious problems as recently as April, and FBI didn't deal with Title III, which it oversees.

3) NCTC basically said, "yeah, we've been getting Title I since 2012 and 702 since 2017 but since we've only been getting 702 since 2017 we can't review any of it."

4) Also, NCTC didn't talk about what must be one of their big disseminations: watchlisting people. Not a serialized report but BAM, you can't board a plane anymore.

[Intermission: kudos to CIA, which submitted the only report that had interesting tidbits devoid of bad faith holes.]

5) But wait! Both CIA and FBI basically say, "targeting? NSA does targeting. We can ignore the fact that NSA disseminates the raw feeds from thousands of selectors to us."

6) FBI pretty much outright lies by saying "Targets under Section 702 collection who are subsequently found to be U.S. persons, or non-U.S. persons located in the U.S., must be detasked immediately." Not true for the 2014 exception data, which is almost certainly domestic comms.

7) FBI: blah blah blah reverse targeting. Except for an ENTIRE DECADE people like Feingold and Wyden have been pointing out that if reverse targeting is A purpose, it's all good.

8) FBI doesn't talk about ad hoc databases, a form of dissemination, nor its recent problems with same. But it's happy to point to new rules requiring it to stop the problems it recently had!!

9) FBI talks about its finished intel reports but not its investigative files. And not only does FBI not admit it never complies w/notice to defendants, it lists its policies by which it refuses to do so AS A PRIVACY PLUS!!!!!

10) Also a privacy plus for FBI? That its minimization procedures permit it to share with states and foreign governments and so on.

11) FBI ALSO doesn't admit [I know this is getting tedious but it's important] its reviews actually don't review every dissemination, unlike NSA and CIA (the latter for content, not metadata). Kudos to DNI for admitting it doesn't really review all FBI's disseminations, I think

12) So you get the point, right? FBI basically blew this entire report off? The best part is, best as I can tell, they only reviewed finished intel reports on disseminations and POLICY on the stuff that matters.

Call me crazy but when I see a transparency report that looks like... I get more worried when I read such so-called "transparency."

Oh, I forgot the most important bit. Rather than addressing privacy controls over back door searches (which it calls "checks"), it instead says "checks are important."