A controversial U.S. wiretapping program has cleared a major hurdle for its reauthorization just days after it expired.
After months of delays, false starts and interference from lawmakers working to protect and expand the spying powers of the U.S. intelligence community, the House voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years.
Legislation to extend the program – controversial for abuse by the government – passed the House by a vote of 273 to 147. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.
Section 702 allows the U.S. government to eavesdrop on communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Government spies intercepted hundreds of millions of phone calls, text messages and emails with the “forced assistance” of U.S. communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners deemed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of countless Americans each year. (The government claims it’s impossible to determine how many Americans were swept up in the program.) The government argued that Americans themselves were not targeted, so the wiretaps were legal. Still, their phone calls, text messages and emails could be stored by the government for years and later accessible to law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
The House bill also significantly expands the statutory definition of a communications service provider, something FISA experts including Marc Zwillinger, one of the few who advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), have publicly warned against.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden told Wired: “Counter-reformers are not only rejecting common-sense reforms to FISA, they are pushing for a massive expansion of unauthorized espionage against Americans. “Their amendment would force your cable television crews to become government spies and help monitor Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
Last fall, the FBI’s record of abusing the program set off a rare thaw between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans — both of whom were equally concerned about the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists and the current Congress. Disturbed by MP’s behavior. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House lawmakers earlier in the day voted down an amendment that would have imposed new search warrant requirements for federal agencies to access Americans’ 702 data.
“Many of the members who lost this vote have long voted for this specific privacy protection,” said Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties, “including former Speaker P. Losey, Rep. Liu, and Rep. Neguse.”
Earlier this year, the warrant amendment passed the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-standing jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been questioned by friends in the intelligence community. A Brennan Center analysis this week found that 80 percent of the underlying text of the FISA reauthorization bill was authored by members of the Intelligence Committee.
“This information database was searched for data on three million Americans,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “The FBI doesn’t even follow its own rules when conducting these searches. That’s why we need search warrants.”
Rep. Mike Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, campaigned for months with top spy agency officials to block the warrant amendment, which he said would waste the bureau’s precious time and hinder national security. investigation. Turner argued that the communications were collected legally and were already in the government’s possession; no further approval was required to inspect them.