The Senate early Saturday passed an extension of the warrantless surveillance law, moving to renew it immediately after it expires and sending President Biden the legislation that national security officials considered important to fight terrorism, but privacy advocates see as a threat to American interests. .
The law, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, seemed certain to expire over the weekend, with senators unable to reach a deal for most of the day. Friday on whether to consider changes opposed by national security officials. Eagle.
But after hours of negotiations, the Senate suddenly reconvened late Friday for a series of votes in which those proposed amendments were one by one rejected, and early Saturday morning the bill, extended Section 702 by two years, won approval, 60 to 60. 34.
“We have good news for America’s national security,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic majority leader, said as he stood in the late-night session to announce the final deal. Successfully working on the bill. “Allowing FISA to expire would be dangerous.”
In a statement, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland praised the bill’s passage, calling Section 702 “integral to the Department of Justice’s work to protect the American people from terrorist threats , nation-state, cyber and other threats”.
Before final passage, the Senate quickly voted down a series of amendments proposed by privacy-minded lawmakers. Approval of any of those provisions would send the bill back to the House, allowing the statute to expire for a more significant period of time.
“Any amendments added to this bill at this time are tantamount to repealing the bill,” warned Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
Although the program has the legal authority to continue operating through April 2025 regardless of whether Congress extends the law or not, the White House sent a statement to senators on Friday warning them that “one major provider has said it intends to stop collecting fees on Monday” and another program said it is considering stopping collections. The statement did not identify them and the Justice Department declined to say more.
The statement also said that the administration is confident that the FISA court will order any such company to continue complying with the program, but that there may be gaps in fee collection in the meantime — and if a series of suppliers challenge the program, “the situation will happen”. can get very bad and dangerous very quickly.” It called on senators to pass the House bill without any amendments by the midnight deadline.
But Sen. Rand Paul, a liberal Kentucky Republican, rejected the rationale and said the Senate should be allowed to debate the changes even if it would cause delays Short-term.
“This is an argument that has been imposed on us by FISA advocates who don’t want to debate and they don’t want to be constrained,” he said. “They don’t want a warrant and they don’t want anything to protect Americans.”
The bill finally received the 60th vote needed to pass just before midnight. But in a twist, after all the urgency, the Senate kept the vote open for more than 40 minutes to make room for Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican who finally appeared in the room was almost empty and yet another “no” vote.
The failed amendments included a measure that would have required the government to obtain a warrant before viewing the content of Americans’ communications included in the program. It was defeated, 42-50.
Privacy advocates have long sought some form of warrant requirement, which national security officials oppose, saying it would cripple the program’s effectiveness. A similar amendment has been made in the House of Commons just lost this week with a tie vote of 212-212.
The Senate also rejected a proposal to eliminate a provision added by the House that would have expanded the types of providers that could be forced to participate in the program. This measure is aimed at certain data centers for cloud computing That FISA court ruling in 2022 falls outside the current definition of what services the statute covers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Privacy advocates have warned that it is too broadly worded, risking abuse. Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, criticized the provision as “horribly drafted, covering new oversight agencies that we will surely regret.”
But Mr. Warner pledged to work with colleagues to “further refine” the definition in another bill later this year, and an amendment to remove the provision was defeated, 34-58.
And the Senate rejected Mr. Paul’s proposal to prohibit the government from buying personal information about Americans from data brokers if a warrant was needed to force a company to directly turn over that information. The House last week passed a separate bill, titled the Fourth Amendment Not for Sale Act, that would have that same measure.
Privacy advocates, who spent more than a year pushing for warrants only to see the bill expand the scope of the surveillance program, expressed deep disappointment. Among them is Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.
“While some senators have fought courageously to protect Americans’ civil liberties, they have not been able to overcome a barrage of false and misleading statements from the administration and its opponents,” she said. surveillance hawks in congressional intelligence committees.” “This is truly a shameful episode in the history of the US Congress and sooner or later the American people will have to pay the price.”
Section 702 allows the government to collect, from US companies like AT&T and Google, the messages of foreigners in foreign countries who are targets of foreign intelligence or counterterrorism purposes without a warrant – even when they were communicating with the Americans.
The idea is that in the internet age, foreigners’ communications are often handled by domestic companies. But the tool is controversial because the government also scans Americans’ messages to and from those foreign targets.
Civil libertarians in Congress have long raised concerns about Section 702’s impact on Americans’ privacy rights. In recent years, they have been bolstered by the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, which is closely aligned with former President Donald J. Trump’s hostility toward the FBI.
The law stems from the warrantless wiretapping program that President George W. Bush secretly created after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The program violated the Water Intelligence Surveillance Act other than 1978, which required a license for national security eavesdropping on domestic soil.
After the program came to light, Congress in 2007 legalized a form of it in a short-lived law called the Protect America Act, which made an exception to FISA warrant requests for eavesdropping on U.S. soil targeting foreigners abroad. Lawmakers enacted Section 702 the following year as a more permanent version and renewed it in 2012 and 2018.
Much of the debate over its renewal focuses on the fact that under current regulations, intelligence analysts and FBI agents can search raw databases of Section 702 interceptions to Find information about Americans. If there was an attack, officials could read Americans’ private messages collected without a warrant and use it to investigate.
Although there are strict rules about when such queries are allowed, in recent years the F.BI. officials searched many times were later found to have violated those standards, including that they lacked adequate justification or were too broadly defined. Problematic queries include searches that use an identifier legislator, Black Lives Matter protesters and riot suspects at the Capitol on January 6.
In response, the FBI did tighten its system as of 2021 and the bill codifies many such restrictions into law.
The law was again set to expire in December, but Congress voted to extend it until Friday to give it more time to consider the proposed changes. But the debate has roiled Congress, especially in the often dysfunctional House of Commons, and plans to bring the issue to the House floor have repeatedly failed, leading to last-minute back-and-forths. .
Before the tragedy in the Senate, the bill emerged after another seemingly botched failure a week earlier in the House. As lawmakers prepared to vote on whether to introduce the bill, Mr. Trump called on supporters to “KILL FISA.”
Mr. Trump’s outburst is part of his years-long effort to stoke discontent about national security agencies. His discontent stems from The inspector general’s findings that the FBI botched traditional FISA warrant applications targeting a former campaign consultant as part of an investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Even though it was a different form of national security surveillance — traditional FISA requires a warrant to target people on U.S. soil — 19 far-right Republicans blocked the House from adopting the statute. Section 702 law.
Two days later, Speaker Mike Johnson reinstated it, cutting the extension to two years from five – meaning Mr Trump will be responsible when it comes up again if he wins the 2024 election — and far-right Republicans allowed the House to vote on the bill.
