FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said the quiet part out loud, seemingly acknowledging that warrantless wiretaps are unnecessary and yet urging employees to use them more.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was reauthorized and expanded, giving intelligence agencies and law enforcement broader scope to collect data on US citizens. The bill is so expansive that it was nicknamed the “Stasi Amendment,” a reference to the notorious East German secret police force.

Despite the FBI aggressively pushing for reauthorization of the expanded bill, it appears the agency knows such surveillance powers are not necessary. In an email leaked to WIRED, Deputy Director Paul Abbate urges FBI employees to use the ability to search for data on US citizens in an effort to prove that the capability is needed.

“To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements,” Abbate wrote in the email. [Emphasis his.]

“I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use US person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law,” added Abbate.

As a general rule, if the program was truly necessary, wouldn’t its value already be apparent? Wouldn’t the FBI have plenty of data to show how much it needs the program if it was truly yielding results? Why should the FBI’s employees need to use warrantless surveillance more to provide why they need to use it in the first place?

Lawmakers are evidently beginning to ask the same questions.

“The deputy director’s email seems to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but as a default,” says US representative Zoe Lofgren. “This directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”

Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to monitor the communications of foreign individuals for national security reasons. As part of that surveillance, the communications of US citizens is often scooped up as well, and the bill allows for those communications to be stored for years. What’s more, the FBI has the authority to go back and search those communications in conjunction with things that have nothing to do with national security, such as a criminal investigation, and can share that information with other law enforcement.

If the FBI had a well-established track record of responsibly using its ability there might be slightly less concern. By the FBI’s own admission, however, the agency has a terrible track record of abusing its access to said data.

It’s little wonder that Senator Ron Wyden slammed the expansion of Section 702.

“The House bill represents one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history,” Senator Wyden said. “It allows the government to force any American who installs, maintains, or repairs anything that transmits or stores communications to spy on the government’s behalf. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, or a phone. It would be secret: the Americans receiving the government directives would be bound to silence, and there would be no court oversight. I will do everything in my power to stop this bill.”

And that was before the leaked email that “directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”