Lawmakers passed legislation Saturday morning reauthorizing and expanding a controversial U.S. surveillance law shortly after the powers expired at midnight, rejecting opposition from privacy advocates and lawmakers.
The bill, passed by a vote of 60 to 34, reauthorizes powers known as Section 702 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the government to collect the communications of foreign persons in accessing the records of technology and telephony providers. Critics, including lawmakers who voted against reauthorization, say FISA also sweeps Americans’ communications while spying on its foreign targets.
White House officials and intelligence chiefs have rallied behind efforts to reauthorize FISA, arguing that the law prevents terrorist attacks and cyberattacks and that a lack of powers would harm the U.S. government’s ability to collect information. The Biden administration says the majority of classified information contained in the president’s daily intelligence briefing comes from the Section 702 program.
Privacy advocates and rights groups have rejected the FISA reauthorization, which does not require the FBI or NSA to obtain a warrant before searching the Section 702 database for communications Americans. Accusations that the FBI and NSA abused their authority to conduct warrantless searches of Americans’ communications have become a major challenge for some Republicans who initially sought more privacy protections.
The bipartisan effort aimed to require the government to obtain a warrant before searching its databases for Americans’ communications. But these measures failed before the final vote in the Senate.
Following the bill’s passage in the early hours of today, Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said FISA was “indispensable” to the US intelligence community.
The bill now goes to the President’s desk, where it will almost certainly pass.
FISA became law in 1978, before the advent of the modern Internet. It began to come under increased public scrutiny in 2013 after a massive leak of classified documents exposed the US government’s global FISA wiretapping program, which involved several major companies American technology and telephone companies as reluctant participants.
The Senate was widely expected to pass the surveillance bill, but it faced new opposition after the House last week passed its version of the legislation that critics say would expand the scope of FISA to also include small businesses and telecommunications providers that were not previously subject to the law. the surveillance law.
Communications providers have largely opposed the House’s expanded definition of “electronic communications service provider,” which they say would unintentionally include companies beyond the big tech companies and telecommunications providers that are already obliged to transmit user data.
An amendment, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden, to remove the expanded measure from the bill, did not pass the vote.
Wyden, a Democratic privacy hawk and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused senators of waiting “until the 11th hour to impose renewed warrantless surveillance in the middle of the night.”
“Time and time again, anti-reformers promise that their one-off changes to the law will reduce abuse, and yet each time the public learns of new abuses committed by officials with little oversight significant,” Wyden said in a statement.
Ultimately, the bill passed shortly after midnight.
Despite the last-minute rush to pass the bill, a key provision of FISA prevents government programs under Section 702 from suddenly stopping if legal authorities expire. FISA requires the government to seek annual certification from the secretive FISA court, which oversees and approves government surveillance programs. The FISA court last certified the government’s Section 702 surveillance program in early April, allowing the government to use its lapsed authority until at least April 2025.
FISA will now expire at the end of 2026, leading to a similar legislative showdown midway through the next US administration.
techcrunch
