Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Wednesday that the United States government has gained “vitally important” intelligence about the war in Ukraine from a surveillance law that allows the government to collect foreign communications without a warrant.
The law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enables the US government to obtain intelligence by targeting non-Americans overseas who are using US-based communications services.
“When it comes to this conflict and what Russia is doing in Ukraine, it has proved vitally important,” Monaco said Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Section 702 “has helped us uncover gruesome atrocities in Ukraine, including the murder of noncombatants, the forced relocation of children from Russian-occupied Ukraine to Russia, and the detention of refugees fleeing violence by Russian personnel.”
Monaco’s comments come amid an ongoing battle over whether to reauthorize the law, which is set to sunset at the end of 2023. The law has previously garnered bipartisan backing, although that support has frayed over the past several years over scrutiny for alleged misuse.
Read more at
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/19/politics/surveillance-law-russia-war-in-ukraine/index.html
