House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner and Ranking Member Jim Himes bombarded invitations announcing a “bipartisan celebration” of the continuation of the 702 program last week. The event, which lawmakers dubbed FISA Fest, will be held in a reception room in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday night.
A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a request for comment.
Turner and Himes were instrumental in preserving the FBI’s warrantless access to 702 data. In countless “briefings” since October, both urged members of their respective parties to avoid overly limiting the FBI’s authority. . Instead, both lawmakers touted new procedures designed by the office itself as a sufficient bulwark against further abuses.
Himes and Turner narrowly won that battle last month and worked to overturn an amendment that would have required FBI employees to obtain search warrants before reviewing the communications of Americans caught up in the program. (The amendment, which the Biden White House opposed, failed in a tie, 212-212.) Instead, FBI procedures, now part of Statute 702, require employees to affirmatively “opt-in” before accessing wiretaps. They must also request permission from an FBI attorney before performing “batch queries” of the database. And inquiries about communications from elected officials, journalists, academics and religious figures are now considered “sensitive” and require approval from higher levels in the chain of command.
Congress established Section 702 in 2008 to legitimize an existing surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA) without congressional oversight or approval. The program, more narrowly defined at the time, intercepted communications that were at least partly domestic but included a target the government believed was a known terrorist. While bringing surveillance under its authority, Congress has helped steadily expand the scope of surveillance to encompass a new set of threats, from cybercrime and drug trafficking to weapons proliferation.
While advocates of 702 surveillance often imply that Americans who are wiretapped are communicating with terrorists (a concoction to which Turner himself repeatedly gave credence this year), the allegation is dubious. Officially, the US government’s position is that it is impossible to know which US citizens are being monitored or even how many of them there are. The primary objective of the 702 program is to acquire “foreign intelligence information,” a term that encompasses not only terrorism and acts of sabotage but also information necessary for the government to conduct its own “foreign affairs.”
Critics of surveillance worry that the range of potential targets extends far beyond what is characterized in unclassified environments. It is not controversial to suggest that the United States government (like all governments with spy powers) finds reasons to spy on allies, companies, and even foreign companies. news posts. As long as the target is a foreigner, they have no privacy rights.
The limits of the 702 program remain confusing, even for members of Congress who insist it should not be limited further. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner acknowledged to reporters this week that Section 702 language needs to be “fixed,” even though he voted last month to draft the current language bill.
FISA experts had warned for months that new language introduced by the House Intelligence Committee is too vague in the way it describes the categories of companies the U.S. government can compel, fearing that the government gains the power to compel anyone who has access to a target’s information. online communications to spy on behalf of the NSA: IT workers and data center staff among them.
A trade group representing Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft, among some of the world’s other largest technology companies, agreed last month, arguing that the new version of the surveillance program threatens to “dramatically expand the reach of entities and individuals” subject to Section 702 Orders.
“We’re working on it,” Warner said the record on Monday. “I’m absolutely committed to fixing that,” she said, suggesting the best time to do so would be “in the next intelligence bill.”