The US Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday after congressional leaders earlier this month stripped the bill of provisions designed to protect against government surveillance. excessive. The “mandatory” legislation now heads to President Joe Biden for his long-awaited signature.
The Senate’s 85-14 vote solidifies a major expansion of a controversial U.S. surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Biden’s signature will ensure that the Trump administration opens with new power to force a wide range of companies to help American spies intercept phone calls between Americans and foreigners abroad.
Despite concerns about unprecedented spy powers falling into the hands of controversial figures like Kash Patel, who has vowed to investigate Donald Trump’s political enemies if he is confirmed to head the FBI, Democrats ultimately made little effort to stop the program.
The Senate Intelligence Committee first approved changes to the 702 program this summer with an amendment aimed at clarifying newly added language that experts had called dangerously vague. The vague language was introduced into the law by Congress in April, and Senate Democrats have promised to correct the problem later this year. In the end, those efforts were in vain.
Legal experts began issuing warnings last winter about Congressional efforts to expand FISA to cover a wide range of startups that were not originally subject to Section 702’s wiretapping directives. By reauthorizing the program in April, the Congress changed the definition of what the government considers an “electronic communications service provider,” a term applied to companies that can be required to install wiretaps on behalf of the government.
Traditionally, “electronic communications service providers” refers to telephone and email providers, such as AT&T and Google. But as a result of Congress redefining the term, the new limits on the government’s wiretapping powers are unclear.
It is widely assumed that the changes were intended to help the National Security Agency (NSA) attack communications stored on servers in US data centers. However, due to the classified nature of the 702 program, the updated language intentionally avoids specifying which types of new businesses will be subject to the government’s lawsuits.
Marc Zwillinger, one of the few private lawyers to testify before the country’s secret surveillance court, wrote in April that the changes to Statute 702 mean that “any American company could have its communications (wiretaped) by an owner with access to the office wiring, or the data centers where your computers reside,” thus expanding the 702 program “to a variety of new contexts where there is a particularly high probability that the communications of U.S. citizens and other persons in the US are ‘inadvertently’ acquired by the government.”