This system is only good for the coercion of threats to the state exposing their rampant corruption or hampering their corrupt schemes, and they can’t take those before a judge to get a warrant.
https://reclaimthenet.org/house-renews-fisa-section-702-rejects-warrant-requirement
The reforms add paperwork and prison time for misuse, but they leave the part everyone has fought about for two decades exactly where it was.
By Ken Macon
The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.
Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.
Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.
The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.
The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.
The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.
None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.
A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.
The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Top intelligence officials told Congress a warrant requirement would slow them down and make Americans less safe.
Stewart Baker, the former NSA general counsel, testified in January against the idea, telling lawmakers, “Saying, ‘oh, you need a separate warrant if you’ve got a separate interest in getting access to information we already collected for intelligence purposes,’ we shouldn’t make that mistake with something as important as things like terrorism or espionage.” That assumes the question is about efficiency but the Fourth Amendment is not really an efficiency provision.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pressed the same case to the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, saying, “This department strongly supports the reauthorization of FISA 702. It is not hyperbole to say many of the most important missions we have executed could not have happened without the intelligence gathered through FISA 702.”
The Trump administration has spent weeks lobbying House Republicans for a clean extension, and in March told Congress the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had renewed the program’s certifications, allowing it to keep running for another year regardless of what Capitol Hill did.
To get the bill across the finish line, Speaker Mike Johnson tacked on a separate sweetener for the privacy-minded Republicans he could not win over with reform language.
The added provision permanently bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency, a hypothetical government-issued digital dollar that conservative lawmakers warn could give federal authorities a real-time window into Americans’ spending. Anti-CBDC advocates have been hunting for a must-pass legislative vehicle for months, and FISA reauthorization fit the bill.
Rep. Chip Roy, one of the leading GOP privacy voices on the floor during debate, framed the broader fight in plain terms. “We should all be standing up for the Fourth Amendment,” he said. House Intelligence Chairman Rick Crawford defended the package as it stood, telling colleagues, “While no one in Washington can get 100% of what they want all the time, this bill makes measurable reforms to strengthen oversight and accountability, while maintaining the criticality of this national security tool.”
Across the Capitol, the calculus is different. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has called the CBDC ban a “poison pill” and told reporters this week that pairing it with FISA renewal is “not happening.” Senate Democrats oppose the digital currency restriction, and Thune has signaled the Senate will likely strip it out and send something back, or pass yet another short-term extension to keep negotiations alive. “I don’t like doing another punt,” he told reporters. “We need a longer-term solution in place, but we obviously have to play the hand we’re dealt.”
That punt, if it comes, would be the second this month. Congress already passed a 10-day stopgap before the original April 20 deadline. The pattern is becoming familiar. The deadline arrives, the warrant fight resurfaces, the warrant requirement gets dropped, and the program keeps running.
Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, summarized what most reform-minded members felt walking out of the chamber. “This program is rightly controversial, and it is a shame that my Republican colleagues did not use this process to debate thoughtful and bipartisan reforms to further safeguard Americans’ privacy without hamstringing our intelligence agencies’ ability to keep our country and our constituents safe,” he said.
The vote leaves the substance of the program unchanged in the way that has always counted most. Federal agents can still pull an American’s emails out of a database built for foreign intelligence collection without ever asking a judge whether they should.
The reforms add paperwork, attorney review, and the possibility of prison time for misuse. They do not add probable cause. For three more years, the warrantless side of warrantless surveillance stays warrantless if it passes the senate.