A group of 19 Republican lawmakers on Wednesday joined with Democrats to block a bill that would have reauthorized the federal government’s spying authority with a few minor tweaks. At issue is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows warrantless surveillance of foreigners but is also routinely used to spy on American citizens.
As it stands now, the law, which is set to expire April 19, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals based overseas, but it also lets the FBI comb through the massive amounts of data the intelligence community collects and gather information about American citizens. These are known as “backdoor searches,” and an unlikely coalition of conservative Republicans and left-wing Democrats want to change how these searches are conducted.
Specifically, they want to require that the FBI obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for information about Americans — a reasonable reform. The intelligence community, and the members of the House Intelligence Committee over whom they have influence, oppose this.
Why? The most straightforward answer is that the main purpose of the intelligence community’s surveillance programs isn’t to spy on terrorists or foreign adversaries overseas, it’s to spy on American citizens. So of course the intelligence community opposes FISA reforms that would make it harder to spy on Americans.
Whatever the original justification of Section 702 was — in the wake of 9/11, the intelligence community argued that massive government surveillance capabilities were necessary to keep Americans safe from terrorist attacks — the purpose of it now
