After months of delays, false starts, and interventions by lawmakers working to preserve and expand the US intelligence community’s spy powers, the House of Representatives voted on Friday to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for two years.
Legislation extending the program—controversial for being abused by the government—passed in the House in a 273–147 vote. The Senate has yet to pass its own bill.
Section 702 permits the US government to wiretap communications between Americans and foreigners overseas. Hundreds of millions of calls, texts, and emails are intercepted by government spies each with the “compelled assistance” of US communications providers.
The government may strictly target foreigners believed to possess “foreign intelligence information,” but it also eavesdrops on the conversations of an untold number of Americans each year. (The government claims it is impossible to determine how many Americans get swept up by the program.) The government argues that Americans are not themselves being targeted and thus the wiretaps are legal. Nevertheless, their calls, texts, and emails may be stored by the government for years, and can later be accessed by law enforcement without a judge’s permission.
The House bill also dramatically expands the statutory definition for communication service providers, something FISA experts, including Marc Zwillinger—one of the few people to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)—have publicly warned against.
“Anti-reformers not only are refusing common-sense reforms to FISA, they’re pushing for a major expansion of warrantless spying on Americans,” US senator Ron Wyden tells WIRED. “Their amendment would force your cable guy to be a government spy and assist in monitoring Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
The FBI’s track record of abusing the program kicked off a rare détente last fall between progressive Democrats and pro-Trump Republicans—both bothered equally by the FBI’s targeting of activists, journalists, and a sitting member of Congress. But in a major victory for the Biden administration, House members voted down an amendment earlier in the day that would’ve imposed new warrant requirements on federal agencies accessing Americans’ 702 data.
“Many members who tanked this vote have long histories of voting for this specific privacy protection,” says Sean Vitka, policy director at the civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Demand Progress, “including former speaker Pelosi, Representative Lieu, and Representative Neguse.”
Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240412200505/https://www.wired.com/story/house-section-702-vote/
In addition to the other points being made here, I have to add that this data is not sorted and discarded, it is sorted and KEPT.
So let’s say a few years from now we’re well into a second Trump term and he’s making good on his promise to fuck his enemies, and someone in his regime doesn’t like you. They won’t need for you to actually do anything wrong; all they will have to do is reach into the vast trove of communications you’ve already made, not even overseas but just caught up in the same widely cast net, and find something that appears to be illegal.
As bad as all the present-day uses for this material can be, far worse are the post-facto creation of crimes out of them.
“But they can’t do that!” Yeah, they can and will, if we get a fully authoritarian government. That’s what the Stasi and the Gestapo and the KGB and the Savak and all the rest of those agencies were about: the US will be no different. There’s no such thing as an authoritarian government without an enforcement arm that spies on its own citizens. And when someone has your data, hidden from you and easily manipulated to make it say whatever they want, you will have already done whatever they claim you have done, and the evidence of it will easily be whatever they want it to be.
They can even do a parallel investigation. Use secret information to guide an investigation in the open.