A retired FBI official who supervised the bureau’s warrantless phone surveillance program said then-Director James Comey took no action in response to his warnings about the inefficiencies of the program back in 2014.
Retired special agent Bassem Youssef told The Hill that he informed Comey that the FBI’s Section 215 program, which was enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks and allowed the agency to collect telephone records without a warrant, was “woefully ineffective” and needed to be modified.
The controversial program was revealed to the public by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.
“I explained to Director Comey that the special program was largely ineffective, very costly and highly burdensome to our agents in the field,” Youssef said. “I believe that the program, as it was, was ripe for potential abuses,” he continued. “I think that every law-abiding citizen should feel comfortable and secure in their home in terms of their privacy and that was not the case.”
Youssef, who served under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama as chief of the FBI’s communications analysis unit, supervised the Section 215 program from 2005 through 2014 on a daily basis.
After his retirement in late 2014 he began drafting a memo to help the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board address his concerns on the program and surveillance abuses and sent it to the FBI as well. In his internal audit laid out in the memo, he found that the program produced “little success” and was a waste of time for agents.
The FBI has not yet commented on Youssef’s allegations.
