Call or Email Your Member of Congress Now!!! Vote for These Two “Must Pass” Amendments

When the reauthorization Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act comes to the House floor later this week, both the pro-reform House Judiciary Committee and the pro-surveillance House Intelligence Committee will be offering amendments chock full of details and complexities.
 
In the fog of this legislative struggle, we should remember that at heart there is one basic issue – the widespread practice of government agencies to freely examine the sensitive, personal information of Americans without a warrant. This snooping is enabled by two big loopholes in the law, practices that allow the government to act as if the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution didn’t exist.
 
One way the government does this is through Section 702, enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil. With global communications inextricably linked, Section 702 incidentally sweeps up the communications of Americans. This database gives the government the ability to conduct “backdoor searches” of Americans without a warrant. The FBI has accessed this database millions of times in recent years, turning a program meant for foreign intelligence into a domestic spying tool.
 
The other way the government surveils us is by buying our personal data. Our most sensitive information – including where we’ve been, what we’ve searched for, our romantic lives, our health, and financial data – are scraped from the apps on our smartphones and computers. The government then buys our information from data brokers, outside of any legal authority or oversight by a court.
 
Both forms of snooping need to be curbed with the plain, simple warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The House will soon consider two ways to do this:
 
Closing the “backdoor search loophole”: This amendment requires federal agencies to get a warrant before they can inspect the Section 702-derived data of an American.
 
Closing the “data broker loophole”: This measure, also known as the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, requires federal agencies to get a warrant before they can view commercially purchased data that includes the sensitive, personal information of Americans.
 
As we’ve said before, this can best be done by contacting your U.S. Representative by email or phone with this message:
 
“Please vote to reform FISA’s Section 702 with warrant requirements, both for Section 702 data and for our sensitive, personal information sold to government agencies by data brokers.”

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