Controversial United States wiretapping program a few days after expiration cleared a major hurdle before being reauthorized.
After months of delays, false starts and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the spying powers of the U.S. intelligence community, the House of Representatives voted Friday to extend the Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Legislation extending the program – controversial because it was abused by the government – passed the House 273-147 votes. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.
Section 702 authorizes the U.S. government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners abroad. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts and emails are intercepted by government spies, each with the “forced assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners suspected of possessing “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of countless Americans each year. (The government claims that it is impossible to determine how many Americans are being taken in by the program.) The government says that Americans are not themselves targeted and that the wiretapping is therefore legal. However, their calls, text messages and emails can be stored by the government for years and can then be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
The House bill also significantly expands the legal definition of communications service providers, according to FISA experts. including Marc Zwillinger– one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – has publicly warned against this phenomenon.
“Anti-reformers are not only rejecting common-sense FISA reforms, but they are also pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden told WIRED. “Their amendment would force your cable company to become a government spy and help monitor Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
The FBI history of program abuse kicked off a rare detente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans — both equally bothered by the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists and campaigners. a sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted against an amendment earlier in the day that would have imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans’ 702 data.
“Many of the members who defeated this vote have long voted for this specific privacy protection,” says Sean Vitka, policy director of Demand Progress, a nonprofit focused on civil liberties, “including the “former Speaker Pelosi, Representative Lieu and Representative Neguse”.
The mandate amendment was passed earlier this year by the House Judiciary Committee, whose long-standing jurisdiction over FISA has been challenged by friends in the intelligence community. An analysis this week by the Brennan Center found that 80 percent of the basic text of the FISA reauthorization bill was written by members of the Intelligence Committee.
“The data of three million Americans was searched against this database,” says Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “The FBI wasn’t even following its own rules when doing these searches. This is why we need a mandate.
Rep. Mike Turner, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, campaigned for months alongside top intelligence agency officials to defeat the mandate amendment, arguing it would waste valuable time in office and would hamper national security investigations. The communications are collected legally and are already in the government’s possession, Turner argued; no further approval should be required to inspect them.
