Intelligence agencies, with the help of the current regime, market Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to Congress as a means to keep Americans safe from foreign threats. Instead, as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee demonstrated on Tuesday, it’s become a proven loophole that lets verifiably corrupt bureaucrats spy on Americans.
Nearly two decades after its inception, Section 702 has easily become the security apparatus’ favorite excuse to conduct backdoor, warrantless surveillance on American citizens. The FBI’s infamous and illegal targeting of 2016 Trump campaign adviser Carter Page is one of the most prominent examples of this trend.
If the Biden administration, the officials in the corrupt agencies that benefit from the statute, and establishment legislators have anything to say about it, the bureaucrats at the center of the weaponization fight could get permission to keep spying on Americans without retribution.
Power Grab
If anything was made abundantly clear during the course of the hours-long hearing, the last thing bureaucrats responsible for decades of power abuses want to see is the policy that harbors those abuses to die. The high-level FBI, CIA, DOJ, DNI, and NSA witnesses spent most of their testimonies begging Congress to keep Section 702 intact.
Without Section 702, specifically, NSA Deputy Director George Barnes claimed, “our ability to preserve the nation’s security would be significantly impaired.”
“Last year, nearly every item in the presidential[] intelligence priorities list was addressed in some way, shape, or form by 702. It’s not replaceable. NSA could not
