Congress has extended Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for a few more months until April 2024. According The New York Times, the program was included in the $886 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which passed the House 310 to 118, with bipartisan majority support, on December 14. FISA was due to expire on December 31, 2023.
Senator Ron Wyden wrote in a press release on December 8 that the vote to reauthorize FISA was inserted into the NDAA “without a vote or debate” before the Senate authorized it and passed it to the House. Now, the vote has headed to the desk of President Biden, who called for it to be reauthorized.
Section 702 empowers US intelligence agencies to spy on the communications of foreign targets without a warrant and is behind much of the behind-the-scenes data collection of the US intelligence community. According to the Center for Strategic and International StudiesAlthough introduced in 2008 as an anti-terrorism measure, Section 702 is now used for other illicit activities such as cyberattacks, foreign espionage, and, as Notes from the Biden administration in a statement last month, drug trafficking.
Privacy advocates say the tools it provides to US spy agencies allow them to spy on US citizens. Like the revelations earlier this year that the FBI tech-policy/2023/05/fbi-misused-foreign-surveillance-law-280k-times-to-snoop-on-people-in-the-us/”>I used it inappropriately to collect details about US citizens 280,000 times in 2020 and 2021.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy advocates wrote in a letter urging Congress not renew Section 702 on November 21 that the FBI has used it to access the communications of “tens of thousands” of American citizens, including protesters, activists, political donors and members of Congress.
However, the EFF sees some hope, writing yesterday that the impasse that led to its temporary authorization “means that intelligence community surveillance hardliners were unable to prevent the program's expansion.” the group has order several changes to Section 702, such as requiring court orders to access Americans' communications, closing a loophole that allows spy agencies to buy Americans' data on the open market, and putting “reasonable limits on the scope of surveillance of intelligence”.
