Speaker Mike Johnson faces ANOTHER test of his leadership: Republican unrest now threatens to derail the extension of the FBI’s controversial foreign spying tool
- Section 702 is credited with helping intelligence officers thwart terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, but is also open to abuse by spying on U.S. citizens
- Allows the US to surveil foreign nationals who are not on US soil, even if the party on the other end of such communications is a US citizen in America
Speaker Mike Johnson is making his pitch to colleagues this week to expand the intelligence community’s unwarranted surveillance powers.
A bill to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with new transparency safeguards is expected to appear in the House of Representatives this week, but it is far from clear whether it will receive broad Republican support.
Section 702 is credited with helping intelligence officials thwart terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, but is also open to abuse by spying on U.S. citizens.
It allows the U.S. government to monitor foreigners suspected of having ties to terror who are not on U.S. soil, even if the party on the other end of such communications is a U.S. citizen in America.
Hardliners on the right and left have become strange comrades over accusations that FISA has trampled on Americans’ civil liberties.
Speaker Mike Johnson makes his pitch to colleagues this week to expand the intelligence community’s unwarranted surveillance powers
The Rules Committee is working on drafting and advancing a version of an extension bill on Tuesday.
The bill passed by the House last week would expand the program while adding new changes intended to strengthen oversight and training and ensure transparency of the program.
It won’t include an amendment from Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, that would ban federal agencies from buying information about Americans from private data companies, which has rankled conservative hardliners, but leaders said that could be a standalone vote this week to get.
In March, a compromise bill drafted by negotiators from the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees was abruptly dropped from the House of Representatives meeting schedule over concerns from the Intel Committee over an amendment that would have forced law enforcement agencies to issue an arrest warrant before obtaining communications relating to a US citizen.
The provision requiring a warrant was not in the bill released Friday, but could be voted on as an amendment during debate.
The coalition of progressives, privacy-conscious lawmakers and libertarian-oriented Republicans could battle to include the amendment in the final bill.
That coalition has left its ranks following a number of high-profile missteps by the FBI, after it emerged that agents interrogated the communications of ex-partners, people involved in political activism and more.
Johnson warned in a letter to colleagues last week that if the House of Representatives again fails to pass a FISA renewal bill, the Senate could send a “clean” reauthorization without new privacy protections. That would prevent the House from approving that, or allowing the oversight authority to lapse.
Intelligence officials said they used FISA to thwart arms sales to Iran
A May 2023 report detailed how the FBI used Section 702 to “interrogate” (or search) names of individuals suspected of being on Capitol grounds during the January 6, 2021 riot, Black Lives Matters protesters, crime victims and their families, and donors to one congressional campaign.
In total, the FBI abused Section 702 more than 278,000 times, the document shows.
Although many of Section 702’s uses remain secret, intelligence officials leaked late last year that they had used the controversial tool to thwart arms sales to Iran.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies had used information gathered by monitoring the electronic communications of foreign weapons manufacturers and halting several shipments of advanced weapons to Iran.