​When your daily movements are tracked by your cellphone, you likely have an intuitive sense that this is your private information, even if it is shared with Google or Apple.
 
The Supreme Court made that common perception a principle on Monday.
 
In a 6-3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court ruled that you do, indeed, have an expectation of privacy against government intrusion as your mobile devices track your movements throughout the day.
 
Based on a Solid Precedent
 
Monday’s ruling strengthens and extends a principle established by the Court in Carpenter v. United States (2018), which found that law enforcement needs a probable cause warrant to obtain cellphone users’ daily movements from cell towers.
 
In Chatrie, in which police conducted a broad search of many people’s location histories in order to catch a bank robber, the Court is now setting a broad principle that promises to extend to cases regarding other forms of data held by companies in the cloud.
 
The Court found that Google’s Location History “resembles other private materials – think of emails, documents, photographs, or calendars – that even if stored on Google’s servers, a user reasonably views as his own. And as a result, that he reasonably expects to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.”
 
How We Got Here
 
The Court had to weigh the implications of Carpenter against the Fourth Circuit’s finding that the defendant “did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours’ worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google.”
The majority opinion declared that the comparisons between Location History and cell-site tracking “practically leap off the page.” Cell-site tracking places an individual within one-eighth to four square miles. Google’s Location History placed Chatrie within twenty meters. In addition to this data’s precision, the Court noted the government can retrospectively construct the movements of cellphone users, effectively placing them under surveillance before they can even think of committing a crime.
 
Monday’s majority opinion reiterated the Court’s observation that modern cell phones are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.”
 
Justice Kagan’s Majority Opinion
 
Overall, the government contended that cellphone users voluntarily relinquish their data, that constitutional concerns should be applied on an app-by-app basis, and that the search was too brief to be constitutionally significant.
 
Justice Elena Kagan penned the majority opinion, which bitingly dissected each of the government’s arguments, starting with the assertion that our data sharing is voluntary. Justice Kagan noted that Google repeatedly prompts users to enable Location History. She wrote:
“The first prompt comes when a user initially establishes a Google account. If that spur is ignored, another will arrive when a user sets up a Google app – like Google Assistant, Google Maps, or Google Photos – on his phone or other device. Android (though not iPhone) users are specifically warned that their devices will not ‘work correctly’ unless they turn on Location History.”
 
What about the government’s claim that law enforcement accessing Location History should receive a Fourth Amendment “grace period” of some number of hours? Justice Kagan sardonically referred to this short grace period of a few hours as a “Constitution-free zone.”
 
At risk, she wrote, were “trips that a person is apt to think ‘indisputably private’ to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center … or the criminal defense attorney.”
 
Justice Kagan’s analysis tracked PPSA’s amicus brief, in which we held that “where the Fourth Amendment applies, it applies regardless of ‘the quality or quantity of information’ the government obtains.”
 
Justice Kagan also turned to how cellphone technology is actually used today to demolish the government’s idea of analyzing the constitutional implications of a search feature by digital feature. She wrote:
 
“The Government’s app-by-app, feature-by-feature method of granting Fourth Amendment protection misapprehends the very nature of modern cell-phone use. Pretty much everything a person does on a smartphone requires some kind of opt-in – an ‘affirmative act’ beyond ‘powering up’ to utilize a given app or service.”
 
Justice Kagan added:
 
“The Government wishes to disconnect all those [private] uses from the mere act of carrying a turned-on cell phone … with only the latter receiving assured Fourth Amendment protection. But that is to imagine that all of us are living in dumb flip-phone days. The point of carrying smartphones is what is on them” (emphasis added).
 
In its conclusion, the Court’s opinion harked back to Carpenter to define the access of historical location information, whether from a cell tower or Google’s Location History, as a search.
 
Monday’s ruling, however, does not fully resolve this case. The Supreme Court is sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit to define the probable cause requirements for every stage of the warrant process and to determine what the proper scope of the search should be.
 
Still, this is a monumental victory for privacy. Until now, as PPSA emphasized in our amicus brief, Carpenter has been treated by law enforcement as a narrow ruling that did not extend beyond location histories extracted from cell towers. Today’s ruling makes it clear that the Supreme Court intends to apply these Fourth Amendment principles across the digital landscape.

​Imagine if one private company didn't just sell equipment or software to your local police department, but became the operating system for policing itself – managing body camera footage, dispatch records, 911 calls, jail bookings, license plate reader databases, AI analytics, and more, all through a single cloud platform.
 
This dystopian vision, taken to an extreme in the classic film RoboCop – in which a predatory corporation acquires an entire police department – is arriving faster than most Americans realize. The integration of business and policing raises new concerns about privacy, accountability, and the concentration of surveillance power.
 
Vendors are pressing this “operating system” model on police departments, seeking to collect, manage, control, analyze, and optimize the flow of data that contains sensitive information on millions of Americans – including not just suspects, but also their families, neighbors, co-workers, friends, and crime victims.
 
A new white paper released by the American Civil Liberties Union and authored by Jay Stanley with Lauren Yu details all the reasons why the integration of corporate and police priorities can degrade the traditional constitutional protections built into policing.
 
Weak protections for AI-derived data
Stanley and Yu note that with so much collected data, “vendors are pushing AI hard on their law enforcement customers as a shortcut to squeezing value out of data. Examples include video analytics, AI-assisted police reports, and algorithmic inspection of license plate reader data for ‘suspicious’ movement patterns.”
 
What uses might this valuable data serve beyond law enforcement? Many companies pledge not to share, sell, or access data except in tightly controlled, audited circumstances for support and maintenance. 
 
Stanley and Yu write: “The problem is the lack of barriers to violating these promises and the near impossibility of discovering if those clauses are violated because of how easy it is to copy, transfer, and share data without leaving any fingerprints, especially within an opaque private company.”
 
Lack of checks and balances
 
Law enforcement answers to democratically elected officials. Transparency and accountability are enforced by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, email and other data retention requirements, and the budgetary and policy oversight of city councils, oversight boards, internal affairs bureaus, and other officials.
 
Companies lack these checks and balances. Local governments are learning to offload responsibilities to the private sector to shield themselves from public scrutiny. In New Orleans, for example, the police avoid local regulations on facial recognition by using a private organization to apply that technology on their behalf.
 
And when something goes wrong, the authors note, “you can’t use voter pressure to make a bad company ‘resign’ the way a sheriff might do if they do something bad.”
 
Bias toward prosecution
 
The mixture of profit and prosecution could degrade traditional safeguards in police work. Stanley and Yu write:
 
“Vendors in the law enforcement space have an incentive to demonstrate that their products are great at helping police catch criminals. This means that they have a financial incentive in being able to say that their products led to a high number of arrests and convictions – they gain no marketing advantage when crime is low and people go free.”
 
Vulnerable honeypots
 
For decades, police records tended to remain scattered among thousands of local departments. But cloud computing changes that equation. Information that once sat on local servers is increasingly stored in centralized corporate systems, creating nationwide repositories of highly sensitive data.
 
With so many companies centralizing and storing police data in the cloud, vendors are creating “honeypots” of sensitive data attractive to hackers. “Worsening the situation is the fact that good cybersecurity costs money, and yet most costs of breaches often fall not on the company but on ordinary people.”
 
As surveillance technologies become more powerful and more interconnected, policymakers should ensure that constitutional protections evolve just as quickly. Otherwise, the greatest expansion of police surveillance may come from corporations quietly becoming policing’s digital backbone, if not its brain.

​Emily Kopp of the Daily Caller writes that “FISA Section 702 targets foreign nationals, but it also hoovers up the communications of Americans when they’re on the other end of the text thread or email chain. The FBI can peer into its classified mass surveillance database for dirt on Americans without ever asking a judge for a warrant.”

Kopp reports:

“Some Members of Congress and the corporate media frequently cite the intelligence community’s claim that Section 702 informs 50-70% of items in the President’s Daily Brief, while never specifying how much of this intelligence requires warrantless spying on Americans.”

The article quotes PPSA General Counsel Gene Schaerr:

“What the ‘intel bros’ constantly do is conflate the use of Section 702 to surveil foreigners with the use of Section 702 to surveil Americans. They’re constantly playing this game of flimflam. Nobody disagrees that Section 702 is really important. The question is why do you need to surveil Americans? They never even try to make the case.”

Kopp’s reporting raises a point that should be top of mind when Congress once again considers reauthorizing Section 702.

“A recent court filing revealed the FBI holds 39,650 records that may shed light on the frequency of abuse. But the Department of Justice (DOJ) won’t release even a tiny fraction until August – by which time it’s likely the Bureau’s spooks will have already secured an extension of the program.

“The scale of the FBI’s snooping is unknown. But it’s clear that any American can fall into the FBI’s dragnet, even the president, Schaerr points out.”

Kopp also reports that Members of Congress have read a March legal opinion from the FISC, revealing routine abuses of Americans’ constitutional rights. The ruling remains classified, but press reports indicate that it sharply criticized a filter on the mass surveillance database that underreports searches of Americans’ information.
​
Read Kopp’s Daily Caller piece here.

​It’s a bookmark that only privacy advocates would ever think of creating. Maintained by Kansas Watch, it’s a catalog of abuses related to automated license plate readers, called the ALPR Abuse Library. Since 2019, there have been 64 documented incidents in 26 jurisdictions.

Of those, 20 involve stalking or targeting (along with eight other distinct categories of violations). Here are a few of the recent stalking entries, each of which the site links to original sources:

• Former officer used police databased to track his mistress and harass her with thousands of texts and phone calls

 

• Ex-detective misused police resources to track spouse; child sex abuse material found

 

• Sheriff used Flock cameras to search for wife’s vehicle

​

• Police officer allegedly used department database to stalk woman he met on at a television shoot

According to the Institute for Justice (IJ), which also tracks such police-related incidents, the root cause is one we’ve discussed many times: the complete absence of a search warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment, which, warns IJ, “predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”

For those concerned about potential abuse of ALPR systems (particularly those made by Flock Safety), one place to begin is to see if your license plate shows up in publicly available search databases such as Have I Been Flocked. IJ also operates an education and advocacy site devoted to fighting the unconstitutionality of ALPR technology, called The Plate Privacy Project.

The warrant requirement in the Constitution precedes the electronic era. The Founders’ primary reason for including it was a concept as familiar then as it is relevant now: Searches that are overly broad, unsupported by cause, and conducted without oversight are sure to be abused – a danger the Founders knew was ripe for exploitation in any age.
​
When police can misuse ALPRs for petty, personal reasons, the eventual abuse of these systems by government officials for larger political reasons is virtually assured.

​In our last post, we reported on leaks that reveal that the Bulgarian government has approved the export of advanced spy technologies to governments around the world, many of them with poor ratings for their treatment of human rights, press freedoms, and political dissent.
 
Thanks to this technology, tyrants, tormentors, and regimes around the world have gained unprecedented capabilities to intercept communications, track individuals, and harvest sensitive personal data – texts, emails, and calls – through defects in global telecommunications systems.
 
Who is behind this privacy apocalypse?
 
The Same Players Keep Appearing
 
Human Rights Watch notes that the company selling these exploits, Circles, was founded by Tal Dilian, who also founded Intellexa, maker of the Predator zero-click tool. Dilian was sanctioned by the United States in 2024 for activities connected to the development and distribution of commercial spyware used against journalists, dissidents, policy experts, and government officials. Circles itself also has historical ties to NSO Group, the maker of Pegasus. 
 
The result is an ecosystem in which a relatively small group of firms and executives have repeatedly surfaced in controversies involving surveillance abuses around the world. Their activities demonstrate how interconnected the commercial spyware industry has become.
 
A Growing Threat to Privacy and Democracy
 
Such technologies often operate in secrecy, with little transparency, limited judicial oversight, and no remedies for victims.
 
Human Rights Watch recently documented how surveillance technologies exported from European countries have been used by governments to target journalists, activists, academics, humanitarian workers, and political critics. The organization concluded that existing controls are failing to prevent sales to countries where there is a substantial risk of abuse. 
 
Figures ranging from journalists in Mexico and India to opposition politicians in Spain, and even a British prime minister, have been targeted by Pegasus software. With the expansive growth of Circles’ new surveillance software, Americans should wake up and realize that we are not immune to this global trend.
 
As PPSA noted in our original reporting on mercenary spyware, American officials have already been targeted by foreign spyware campaigns. The proliferation of these capabilities means that sophisticated digital surveillance is becoming cheaper, more accessible, and harder to contain. 
 
The Lesson
 
The leaked Bulgarian licenses provide another reminder that surveillance technology does not stay confined to the governments that first develop it. In short, the spread of mercenary spyware was once viewed as an emerging problem. Today, it is a mature global industry.
 
The dangers posed by these sophisticated attacks have long been foreshadowed in Congressional testimony and hearings. Yet solutions are not obvious or easy. Like narcotics, surveillance tech often spreads through international markets, private vendors, shell companies, and workarounds of export controls until powerful interception capabilities become available to governments around the world, as well as criminals and cartels.
 
Congress and policymakers must now recognize that this global marketplace for commercial spying tools is thriving and potentially threatens any American. The question is whether democratic governments will establish meaningful safeguards before these technologies become even more pervasive – and even more difficult to control.

​“C-22” just sounds like the name of something dangerous, and thanks to Canada, it is. The country’s government continues to push a privacy-busting measure of epic proportions. As we wrote in May, Bill C-22, “An Act respecting lawful access” to digital data, has the potential to – among a host of other transgressions – end encryption not only in Canada, but worldwide.

The proposal has had three readings in the House of Commons and last week received its first reading in the Canadian Senate. All of this, notes Thorin Klosowski of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has occurred in a complete absence of serious debate. In fact, the Conservative minority has accused the Liberal government of attempting to ram through the legislation through highly unusual and “undemocratic” methods.

This Lawful Access Act, as it’s also known, was recently scrutinized by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Their findings read like that moment in a blockbuster when the horror-stricken protagonists flip through the pages of a diabolical secret plan, then look despairingly into the distance while the minor chords swell to a crescendo.

And with good reason.

The bill’s second part in particular is a pro-surveillance, anti-privacy juggernaut, which The Citizen Lab sums up as a “mix of open-ended powers, flexible safeguards, and a government-driven oversight framework that excludes strict judicial controls.” The net effect of this new regime will be to create “significant human rights, privacy, and cybersecurity hazards.”

What could possibly go wrong?

In an open letter urging C-22’s withdrawal, the Global Encryption Coalition zeroed in on the privacy Achilles heel that the legislation’s second part represents:

“There is no way to provide backdoor access to encrypted data and communications without compromising the privacy and security of millions of law-abiding citizens. This is particularly true in the wake of new AI systems that can autonomously scan software, find the vulnerabilities created by encryption backdoors, and write attacks to break in.”
​
If ever there was a bill that deserves vigorous debate, says the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, this is it. Even worse, the damage to security and privacy caused by the Salt Typhoon should remind us that killing encryption would be a gift to China, as well as to common criminals.

Ample Time for Debate

The decision by the Trump administration to effectively suspend its push for the reauthorization of FISA Section 702 is a tacit admission of what PPSA has been saying all along: there is no credible national security reason to rush this process.
 
While the statute has expired, Section 702 intelligence collection will continue under orders issued by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) until March 2027. In the meantime, there have been zero reports of problems with intelligence collection – which, to be sure, would be trumpeted by the intelligence community if that were the case.
 
We don’t know when the current legislative muddle on the Hill will clear. We do know that when it does, it will be important to get it right in the next round.
 
Background

This issue deserves debate and deep attention by Congress. Section 702 is the national security law enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreigners on foreign soil, but has been used in recent years to warrantlessly snoop on the international communications of Americans millions of times. Despite procedural reforms enacted into law two years ago, these changes have done little to address the risks of Section 702.
 
Consider this: Earlier this year, the FISC publicly acknowledged the existence of continuing major compliance problems with Section 702 directly related to Americans’ constitutional rights. The court objected to how the FBI, CIA, and NSA use filtering tools to process our messages.
 
While the administration appeals the court’s finding, Congress and the American people are not permitted to know the exact nature of these compliance issues. With the luxury of time, shouldn’t Congress insist on a public accounting of ongoing problems with Section 702 and Americans’ privacy?
 
What to Ask for When Section 702 Reemerges

It is important to keep all this in mind when the current entanglement clears and Section 702 comes up for a vote again. House leadership tried and failed three times to force a vote on Section 702 reauthorization, breaking with tradition by preventing debate on meaningful amendments.
 
The same approach also failed once in the Senate. Leadership in both houses repeatedly tried to push the next reauthorization of FISA Section 702 between three and five years from now – a key reason for the failure of this strategy. One key principle Congress should uphold:
 

• Reject any reauthorization for Section 702 that is longer than two years. AI is supercharging surveillance at breakneck speed. Given the ongoing reports of Section 702 violations – and the escalating ability of AI to pull data from disparate sources to create dossiers on every American – Congress will need to keep oversight prompt.

 
Whenever the path opens to focus again on reauthorization, Members of Congress must insist that this time they be allowed to vote on key amendments:

• Add a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches of Americans’ communications.
  
  
• Apply a warrant requirement to the federal government’s purchase and review of Americans’ sensitive personal data – closing the data-broker loophole.
  
  
• Narrow the definition of “electronic communication service provider” to exclude countless small businesses – and even houses of worship – from being forced by the NSA to assist in spying on customers and congregants. 
  
  
• Stop political abuses in secret FISA Court cases by (a) requiring non-partisan amici to advocate for the American public in sensitive cases and (b) enhancing penalties for government misbehavior.
  ​
  
• End the obstruction of key Members’ access to the FISA court.

 
Until now, the terms of the debate have been dictated to majorities in the House and Senate. Those dictating those terms have proved unable to enforce them and are now tangled up in a confusing web of competing priorities.
 
It is time for a bipartisan majority to step in and impose clarity. When Section 702 moves forward, it must be with debate over meaningful guardrails to protect the American people from rampant government surveillance.

​Four years ago, PPSA warned about the rise of “mercenary spyware” – powerful surveillance tools once reserved for elite intelligence agencies that were rapidly becoming available around the world. The poster child for this trend was Pegasus, the Israeli-developed “zero-click” spyware capable of silently taking over a smartphone, activating its camera and microphone, turning it into a full-time surveillance device that extracts nearly every detail of a person’s life. 
 
Human Rights Watch reports that the market for such dystopian surveillance technology is now truly global.
 
A new investigation based on leaked Bulgarian export licenses reveals that a surveillance company called Circles received approval to export similarly sophisticated communications interception and phone-tracking technologies to a wide range of foreign governments between 2018 and 2023. According to the documents, Bulgarian authorities licensed exports to Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates. 
 
The governments of many of these countries have been criticized by human rights organizations for surveillance abuses, restrictions on press freedom, and crackdowns on political dissent. Human Rights Watch concluded that the licenses raise serious questions about whether European export controls designed to prevent abusive surveillance exports are being enforced. 
 
What Can These Systems Do?
 
The leaked documents describe a suite of surveillance products that far surpass traditional wiretaps. Unlike Pegasus, a “zero-click” capability that could remotely infect your smartphone without you making a single wrong click, Circles’ technology exploits chinks in the global telecommunications infrastructure, capturing your data as it is transmitted.  
 
Among the exported technologies were:
 

• Software capable of tracking the locations of mobile subscribers

 

• Systems that can remotely intercept voice calls and communications data through weaknesses in global telecommunications infrastructure

 

• Tools designed to facilitate targeted interception of communications

 

• Software that can collect voice, message, and internet traffic from cellular devices

 
As one expert warned Congress in testimony highlighted by PPSA in 2022, capabilities once available only to a few nation-states are now available to dozens. CrowdStrike reports an 89 percent increase this year in AI-enabled  attacks. The most advanced surveillance technologies are no longer confined to a handful of superpowers. They could be in the hands of almost any government – and, before long, in the hands of your competitors or personal enemies.
 
In our next post on this topic, we will look at the corporate entities fomenting this global privacy disaster, the implications for privacy and democracy, and the need for Congress and the administration to develop responses.

​Faith communities answer to a higher authority than the state. They preserve independent institutions, foster private associations, and teach moral truths that governments do not control. For that reason, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, and religious ministries have often found themselves in the crosshairs of governments eager to monitor dissent.

That is why Congress must repeal one of the most dangerous provisions added to FISA Section 702 in 2024 – the expanded definition of an Electronic Communications Service Provider (ECSP), commonly known as the “Make Everyone a Spy” provision.

The ECSP expansion dramatically broadens the range of people and organizations that can be compelled to assist government surveillance, including most businesses that provide free Wi-Fi to customers and tenants. While the debate often focuses on privacy, the provision also poses a direct threat to religious liberty.
​

• Consider the impact of this law on a church-based crisis pregnancy center. Such ministries provide counseling, emotional support, and practical assistance to women facing difficult decisions. Their effectiveness depends on trust and confidentiality. Yet under the ECSP expansion, organizations that merely provide communications infrastructure or access to facilities could potentially find themselves entangled in government surveillance demands while being prohibited from disclosing them.

The chilling effect would be immediate. Individuals seeking spiritual guidance or personal counseling should never have to wonder whether their conversations could become part of a surveillance operation.

History teaches us that such fears are not hypothetical.

• During the 1960s civil rights movement, Black churches served as the organizational heart of efforts to secure equal rights under the law. Meetings, fundraising efforts, strategy sessions, and community organizing frequently took place within houses of worship. Government surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders remains one of the most disgraceful chapters in federal law enforcement history.

Nor is religious surveillance a mere relic of the past.

• In FBI v. Fazaga, Muslim plaintiffs challenged a surveillance operation in which an FBI informant infiltrated Southern California mosques, secretly recording worshippers and collecting information about their religious practices and associations. Innocent believers found themselves under scrutiny not because of criminal conduct, but because of where they worshipped.

 

• More recently, documents released during the Biden administration revealed that FBI personnel discussed developing sources within communities of so-called “radical traditionalist Catholics.” Subsequent disclosures showed that the effort extended beyond a single field office.

And the danger is not confined to one political party. Just as the Biden administration’s treatment of traditionalist Catholics raised alarms, future conflicts between any administration and religious leaders could create similar temptations. Recent tensions between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV illustrate how quickly political disagreements can spill into disputes involving religious institutions.

This is precisely why constitutional protections exist. The First Amendment protects not only the right to worship, but also the right to associate, counsel, organize, and speak freely within religious communities. Those freedoms depend on privacy and trust.

Havel warned that governments seeking greater control cannot tolerate institutions that point to truths beyond official power. Religious communities do exactly that. They remind citizens that there are limits to what government may command and limits to what it may know.

The ECSP expansion pushes in the opposite direction. It creates new opportunities for surveillance to penetrate institutions that have historically served as centers of conscience, dissent, and moral witness.
​
Congress should enact the ECSP fix and restore the narrow definition of compelled assistance. No church, mosque, synagogue, pregnancy center, religious school, or ministry should be transformed into an unwilling arm of the surveillance state.

On Thursday morning, the House voted against Leadership’s short-term clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702. Leadership once again stiff-armed any opportunity to propose amendments with badly needed reforms to protect Americans’ privacy from domestic spying.

This strategy marks a significant break with past Section 702 debates. In 2024, for example, House Members were given the chance to vote on a warrant requirement for Section 702 U.S. person searches, which nearly passed in a 212-212 tie vote. This year, what is clearly now a House majority in favor of enacting reforms and placing guardrails on domestic surveillance has been sidelined, multiple times now.

The result, predictably, is what we saw this morning. After multiple attempts, it should be clear to all that stiff-arming meaningful debate and necessary reforms is a failed strategy.

Having demonstrated what doesn’t work, the House can now take a new path. There is no need to rush it. Members in both the House and Senate should know that when the statute behind Section 702 expires on Friday, intelligence collection will still continue. The surveillance orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are in effect – and will remain in effect – until March 2027.

That is how long Congress has to reauthorize Section 702 without in any way jeopardizing national security.

Looking ahead, House Members must be able to vote on a warrant requirement for Section 702, warrants for the purchased data of Americans, and the removal of the so-called “Make Everyone a Spy” provision that obligates most businesses and even houses of worship to assist the NSA in spying on their tenants, customers, and congregants.

These are not trivial issues for Members or their constituents.

•  A 2023 bipartisan poll showed that 76 percent of Americans support warrant requirements before the government can access Americans’ international communications. Some 80 percent support warrant requirements before the government can access location records, internet search histories, and other highly personal digital records.

The time has come for Leadership to respect the majority – the majority in the House and the majority of the American people.
​
“I am hopeful that the House is now in a place where it will move forward in a constructive debate that will lead to long-needed reforms,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a PPSA Senior Policy Advisor. “It is time to allow for such a full debate and votes on reform amendments.”

Many news organizations are proving to be better at stenography than they are at journalism.
 
They are repeating – uncritically – bombshell accusations from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in a letter to Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio claiming that drastic steps will be needed to offset the loss of intelligence gathering on threats to the United States if Congress allows Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to expire on Friday.
 
“We write with regret to ask that you plan for a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection,” the chairmen of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees wrote on Saturday.
 
They should know better.
 
PPSA, other civil liberties organizations, and our champions on Capitol Hill have time and again corrected this canard. When Congress set the next deadline for the reauthorization of Section 702 on June 12, all it meant is that the statute authorizing this surveillance authority will expire. But the actual collection of foreign intelligence will continue.
 
Charlie Savage of The New York Times is one journalist who gets this right. He reported in April:
​
“The Section 702 program would not immediately shut down if the statute expired. It operates under certifications that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issues each year authorizing the government to direct communications companies to participate. The key provision says these directives ‘shall continue in effect’ until their expiration dates.”
 
Section 702, which was enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance on foreign threats on foreign soil, will thus continue under the court’s orders until March 2027. That is how long Congress has to debate Section 702 before the collection of foreign intelligence would actually be affected.
 
This debate can continue without endangering national security. And the reforms that are being advanced – warrant requirements for the collection and inspection of Americans’ data, as required by the Fourth Amendment – can be passed by Congress without endangering national security either.
 
We can both protect the American people and uphold our constitutional rights. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Writing in Albany’s Times Union, Fabian Rogers and Jason Taper of privacy watchdog STOP remind us that invasive landlords are nothing new. What is new is the way facial recognition has quietly become a tool for controlling tenants.

Landlords, for obvious reasons, don’t like rent-stabilization policies in many cities. Knowing this, technology firms are now marketing facial recognition products as a way to help landlords find new ways to evict people and raise rents (because, to de-regulate an apartment, you first have to empty it). There’s even a wink-wink industry term for this: “de-stabilize.”
​
It’s a technological fishing expedition, and facial recognition tech is the rod. Park a camera at the only door, log every entry and departure, and wait to “catch” a tenant in violation of some technicality – an unauthorized overnight guest or a too-frequent absence that “proves” they don't really live there.

Landlords will use all manner of red herring arguments to whitewash what they’re doing, such as claims of enhanced “safety and security.” In co-author Rogers’ own case, his Brooklyn landlord decided to implement a facial recognition system a mere year after the complex was declared rent-stabilized. Coincidence? The Trojan Horse pitch the landlord used was “frictionless entry.”

Rogers and his fellow tenants weren’t fooled. After they organized, the landlord backed down. In the end, the tenants’ right to privacy trumped the promise of frictionless entry.

This is just one example of how private companies are quietly assembling exactly the kind of always-on surveillance the Constitution forbids the government from building – and that is the loophole. The Fourth Amendment guards your home against the state; it has nothing to say about a property manager with a camera.
​
New York's Senate Bill S8223 would ban landlords from using such tech. This makes sense: No one should have to build a tenant movement simply to preserve the basic freedom to come home without being tracked, watched, and cataloged by the place they live.

President Trump’s selection of Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence has already stymied the hard push by Senate leadership to force through the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Most on the Hill have so far focused on the oddity of the appointment of a housing official with no military or intelligence experience to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“By any objective assessment – in terms of experience, expertise, background – this appointment makes no sense,” said Sen. Angus King (D-ME). Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) chimed in: “I see no evidence of any qualifications for the job.”

Since this is an acting appointment, however, Pulte’s post will not require Senate confirmation. He can serve as acting Director of National Intelligence until Jan. 26, 2027 – although President Trump now says that this is only a “temporary” appointment. Pulte will, at least for now, also continue to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as well as chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But Pulte’s appointment is sure to focus Congress on the possible uses and abuses of the vast amount of warrantlessly collected data authorized by Section 702. The FBI has abused Section 702 millions of times in the last five years, warrantlessly accessing the communications of Americans through backdoor searches.

To complicate matters, as Pulte moves into his new office, he will still face an inquiry by the Government Accountability Office into whether he misused federal authority and resources to publicly accuse prominent Democrats of mortgage fraud.

Whatever you make of all this, it is not helping the cause of surveillance hawks in the House and Senate who are still trying to ram through the reauthorization of Section 702 without allowing any debate on significant amendments.

The ultimate head-scratcher here is why President Trump would allow his allies to push for a reauthorization of a long-abused surveillance authority when he himself was targeted by the misuse of a related FISA authority in 2016 and 2017.
​
PPSA continues to urge President Trump to focus on building a legacy that would reform the surveillance state while bolstering the powers needed to keep America safe. A good place to start would be for House and Senate leaders to allow a debate and votes on amendments that would place guardrails on Section 702.

​A move by Senate leadership to reauthorize the Section 702 surveillance authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without major reforms failed last night in a 52-47 vote.

Seven Republicans joined almost all Democrats: Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), John Kennedy (R-LA), Mike Lee (UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Eric Schmitt (MO), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

“FISA 702 reauthorization failed because it did not contain a warrant requirement for spying on Americans,” Sen. Lee posted on X. “Come back with a warrant requirement, and we’ll pass the bill.”

Much of the momentum behind the “nay” votes by Democrats was a protest against the appointment of the administration’s housing chief, Bill Pulte, to serve as director of national intelligence. But many senators on both sides of the aisle have also listened to PPSA and other civil liberties groups about the need to add warrant requirements before the government can help itself to Americans’ communications and data. Section 702 has been used in recent years to give the FBI warrantless access to the data and communications of Americans in contact with foreigners millions of times.

The measure would also have extended the next reauthorization by three years. At a time when artificial intelligence is enhancing the power of surveillance at breakneck speed, many senators were sympathetic to PPSA’s contention that three years would be too long before the next reauthorization – Congress’s only regular opportunity for oversight of the intelligence community’s surveillance of the American people.

Expect surveillance hawks to now try to alarm Members of Congress by claiming that national security will be endangered when Section 702 expires on June 12.

Any claims about the lapse of a vital national security authority would be nothing but fear-mongering. Only Section 702’s authorizing statute, Title VII, will lapse on June 12. The actual collection of intelligence will continue through March 2027 under orders already issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“Attempts to impose reauthorization without warrants have now failed twice in the House and once in the Senate,” says Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and PPSA Senior Policy Advisor. “It is time for leaders to end these efforts to rush through measures that majorities oppose and begin to consider reasonable reforms that will protect both Americans’ constitutional rights and national security.”

As the Senate regroups and the House turns once again to the issue, PPSA and our civil liberties coalition support the following reform measures:
​

• No more than two years for the next Section 702 reauthorization, giving Congress time to assess the evolution of government surveillance powered by AI.

 

• Pass a warrant requirement for Section 702 searches of Americans’ communications. We cannot continue to allow a foreign intelligence surveillance tool to be turned on our own citizens.

 

• Add a warrant requirement to the federal government’s purchase and review of Americans’ sensitive personal data – curbing the data-broker loophole and ending the routine warrantless inspection of Americans’ highly personal geolocation, internet search history, and internet communications data.

 

• Curb the definition of “electronic communication service provider” under FISA to protect countless small businesses and houses of worship from being forced by the NSA to assist in spying on their customers and congregants.

 

• Prevent political abuses in FISA Title I cases by including the formerly titled “Lee-Leahy Amendment” in the 702 reauthorization. This measure, which passed the Senate in 2020 with 77 votes, would mandate the inclusion of a qualified third-party amicus with expertise in the Fourth Amendment, and holding a high-level clearance, to advocate for the American public in secret FISA court proceedings that implicate American political leaders and other sensitive matters.

PPSA will continue to press Members of Congress to pass these reform measures and we will keep you informed of major developments.

​We’ve long chronicled how China is building the world’s most sophisticated surveillance state. Cameras equipped with facial recognition software, biometric databases, digital tracking systems, and artificial intelligence have become commonplace across the country.

Now, newly reported details reveal a Chinese surveillance apparatus that is even more expansive and well-integrated than previously understood.

In a report by De Zheng for DW, a cybersecurity researcher discovered an exposed Chinese police database connected to a platform known as “Bright Eyes.” The system reportedly maintained extensive records on foreign journalists, visitors, and residents, including passport photographs, visa information, travel histories, and other personal details.

But what makes Bright Eyes remarkable is not merely the quantity of data it collects. It is the way the system combines disparate information into what Chinese authorities call a “holistic personnel archive,” creating “holographic profiles” of individuals.

According to the report, Bright Eyes integrates data from facial-recognition cameras, immigration records, hotel registrations, transportation systems, mobile-phone identifiers, and other databases. The system reportedly can identify not only that a person traveled but also precisely where that person sat on a train, when he entered a venue, and who was nearby.

De Zheng notes: “It even synchronizes photos from different camera systems and checkpoints, creating a continuous visual record of a person's movements.”

Because the system has access to multiple streams of information, authorities can reconstruct a person's activities with extraordinary precision. Officials can analyze not only an individual's movements but also relationships, routines, and patterns of behavior over time.
Perhaps most striking is the system's apparent emphasis on social connections.

The report describes analytical tools designed to determine “how frequently targets are captured interacting on camera, revealing exactly who knows who, and how much time they spend together.” The system maps human networks for social and political analysis.

China’s surveillance architecture offers a warning about the direction technology can take when constitutional constraints are absent. The technologies involved – artificial intelligence, facial recognition, data aggregation, and predictive analytics – are becoming more powerful.

The Solomon Islands in the South Pacific provide a stark example of how this surveillance state can be exported. David Pierson and Berry Wang of The New York Times detailed the pushback by local residents after China installed its “model police state” through a secret agreement with that country’s government.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute warned that the Solomon Islands is becoming China’s “proving ground for authoritarian practices under the guise of community service.” An official mouthpiece of the Chinese government described such Western reactions as “the discomfort of former colonial powers whose exclusive influence in the Pacific is no longer assured.”

But who is the real imperialist in this scenario?

The lesson for Americans is straightforward. Privacy is more than a setting. It is the condition that makes free speech, free association, religious liberty, and a free press possible. Once governments acquire the ability to know everything about everyone, the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourth Amendments become increasingly difficult to exercise in practice.

China’s “holographic profiles” show why constitutional limits on surveillance matter now more than ever. That’s something for Congress to keep in mind when it considers whether to revisit surveillance policy in the ongoing Section 702 debate in two years or much longer.
​
The speed at which artificial intelligence is evolving should lead Americans to insist that Congress keep a tight leash on any would-be American version of Bright Eyes.

At this writing, rumors are circulating around the halls of Capitol Hill that surveillance hawks in the Senate are preparing to press for a reauthorization of FISA Section 702 later this week.

Their version, it is said, would include no warrant requirements for the collection and inspection of the communications of Americans, despite the fact that Section 702 is a legal authority meant to authorize the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil – not to sweep up the communications of vast numbers of Americans.

If the rumors are correct, the Senate scheme would also avoid any effort to close one of the most dangerous and pernicious surveillance practices. We refer to the routine purchase of Americans’ most intimate information – including our location histories, online searches, communications metadata, and other datapoints that reveal our financial, romantic, health, political, and religious concerns and personal associations.

It seems that some in the Senate are also planning to exclude any measure incorporating provisions from the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. These provisions would require the dozen federal agencies – ranging from the FBI to the IRS – to obtain probable cause warrants before purchasing our most personal information from shady data brokers.

The good news is that the Senate will need 60 votes to move any such bill forward, with a number of surveillance reform champions ready to block it.

Perhaps an even better piece of news is that a House majority comprised of Members of both parties is rebelling against attempts by leadership to stiff-arm amendments and try to corral them into votes with tight deadlines.

Leaders in both parties are stepping forward in the House. Witness the recent passage of an amendment led by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) in the House Appropriations Committee to close the data broker loophole.

Or witness this “Don’t Spy on Me” declaration by Members of the House Freedom Caucus.

With different words and regional accents, they all ask why an authority designed for surveilling foreigners is being turned against their constituents. Their rebellion is not remarkable. What’s remarkable is that so many House and Senate leaders are fighting tooth and nail to protect the government’s claimed right to spy on Americans – while some House and Senate leaders appear willing to bend the rules to force Congress to condone it.

The House Freedom Caucus’s anti-surveillance flag is a spinoff of the 1775 “DON’T TREAD ON ME” Gadsden flag depicting a timber rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. This is just one sign that House and Senate Members have had enough of the current departure from regular order designed to cut off all debate and meaningful amendments.

Reformers would do well to remember the words of Christopher Gadsden, creator of the flag bearing his name, who said: “Stand tall, even when the world tries to bring you down.”

​When you hear of a new surveillance program being marketed as a child-safety initiative, give it particularly close scrutiny. History shows that the narrower and more compelling the stated justification for a surveillance plan, the broader and more outlandish the surveillance will actually be.

A newly reported example comes from BusPatrol, a company that has installed AI-powered camera systems on more than 40,000 school buses in 24 states. The cameras have been marketed as a way to identify drivers who ignore the fold-out “STOP” arm signs from buses and illegally pass them while stopped. 

Joseph Cox of 404 Media reports that BusPatrol is now planning a dramatic expansion of its mission. Leaked company documents reportedly show plans to convert school buses into roaming automatic license plate reader (ALPR) platforms that would capture information on every vehicle a bus passes, regardless of whether any crime or traffic violation occurred. The resulting data would then be sold to law enforcement. 

A system designed to document a specific violation at a specific moment is fundamentally different from a system that continuously records the movements of everyone nearby. In effect, school buses would become mobile surveillance vehicles.

Under the proposal, cameras would photograph vehicles, record their license plate numbers, and attach GPS location data. Law enforcement and possibly other actors could then query those records to reconstruct a vehicle's travel history. As privacy advocates have long warned, tracking a car often means tracking a person. 

These bait-and-switch tactics are familiar.

After the attacks of September 11, Americans were told that extraordinary surveillance programs were necessary to prevent terrorism. Many of those authorities later expanded far beyond their original scope. Section 702 of FISA was enacted to monitor foreign threats overseas, yet the communications of millions of Americans became subject to warrantless searches.

From the UK to Congress, we’ve seen how the fight against child sexual abuse material has been used as a shield to threaten the encryption that protects women and children from stalkers, journalists from vengeful politicians, businesses communicating about proprietary information, and millions of law-abiding Americans who want to have a digital conversation without Big Brother listening in.

Government agencies have repeatedly justified the acquisition of vast quantities of personal data by pointing to legitimate public concerns, only for those powers to evolve into broader surveillance tools.

BusPatrol's reported plans follow the same trajectory. A narrowly tailored safety program aimed at preventing children from being struck by passing vehicles could become a platform for collecting location information on millions of ordinary Americans who have done nothing wrong.

The danger is not merely the collection of data. It is the normalization of surveillance infrastructure. Every new camera network creates pressure to find new uses for the information it gathers. Indeed, BusPatrol’s internal documents suggest that this latest move is in response to investor demands for new revenue streams.

Protecting children is a worthy goal. Turning school buses into rolling location-tracking platforms is not.
​
Americans should be wary whenever government agencies or private contractors ask them to trade away privacy in exchange for safety. Proposals like this need their own mounted “STOP” arm signs.

​“The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew the government was able to demand a list of everyone a person called and texted, everyone who watched a YouTube video or visits a website, or uncover anonymous social media accounts, all without a warrant or court order of any kind.” - Sen. Ron Wyden  

During the Biden administration, Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained the phone records of 20 current or former Republican Members of Congress during the federal probe of Donald Trump. Before that, the Department of Justice under the Trump administration obtained the phone records of two Democratic Members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers from both parties.

Administrations of both parties have held such actions to be perfectly legal, despite their being obvious violations of the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a probable cause warrant before inspecting our personal information.

“Americans’ constitutional rights should not disappear just because they made a phone call or sent a text,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY). “Yet today, federal agencies can secretly demand your phone records and personal data from tech companies as often as they want without ever stepping inside a courtroom. This kind of unchecked power is something you’d expect under the Chinese Communist Party, not in the U.S.”

“The very term ‘administrative subpoena’ is an oxymoron that is offensive to the Fourth Amendment,” said Bob Goodlatte, PPSA Senior Policy Advisor and former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “It avoids judicial oversight and gives the executive branch the ability to make legitimate-sounding demands to inspect our houses, papers, effects, and data, when it is in fact just illicit government overreach.”

To rein in this clearly unconstitutional surveillance practice, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Cynthia Lummis, along with Reps. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Robin Kelly (D-IL), and Eric Burlison (R-MO) released the Subpoena Abuse Prevention Act – a bill that would require the government to go before a judge in order to obtain phone records. It would also prevent the use of subpoenas against phone and tech companies to spy on Americans for engaging in speech or other constitutionally protected activities.

The Subpoena Abuse Prevention Act would:

• Require the government to go before a judge before obtaining phone call records, a standard already required for email records

 

• Require certification under penalty of perjury that subpoenas are for legitimate purposes, and not to monitor speech or other constitutionally protected activities

 

• Prevent the government from using subpoenas for bulk collection – such as getting the name of everyone who downloads an app or watches a YouTube video.

“The laws protecting Americans’ rights aren’t keeping up with advances in government surveillance,” Sen. Wyden said. “This bipartisan, bicameral bill rebalances the scales to protect our constitutional rights against unnecessary intrusion by the federal authorities.”

Goodlatte commended the sponsors of this bill for pushing back against a growing practice that endangers our constitutional rights.
​
“PPSA is proud to support this corrective legislation,” he said.

​Tulsi Gabbard is set to depart her post as Director of National Intelligence on June 30 to care for her ailing husband. Before she leaves, Director Gabbard has a golden opportunity to advance government transparency by releasing a secret opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) detailing what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has described as “violations of Americans’ constitutional rights” involving Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
 
Inexplicably, the Justice Department notified Congress in April that it is appealing the release of this crucial opinion describing how the FBI and other agencies violated laws or procedures governing Section 702. Congress enacted this authority to facilitate the surveillance of foreign threats abroad, but in recent years the FBI has also used it to gain warrantless access to the communications of millions of Americans.
 
On May 1, Sen. Wyden secured commitments from the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) – to declassify this important opinion detailing how the FBI and other agencies violated laws and procedures regulating Section 702.
 
Yet the Trump administration continues to block the release of this information in the midst of an intense surveillance debate, as Congress has struggled for weeks to reauthorize Section 702. Releasing the opinion would help lawmakers determine whether the FBI is still conducting warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications despite the guardrails Congress enacted during the 2024 reauthorization.
 
What might kinds of violations may have occurred?
 
Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice reports that the FBI used an “advanced filtering function” to “search for U.S. persons’ communications using terms associated with those persons.” Although such searches plainly met the statutory definition of a query, “the FBI did not treat the searches as queries and therefore did not track or count them.”
 
The existence of a querying tool that allegedly operated outside statutory constraints raises broader concerns. If one such tool escaped oversight, could similar tools exist at other agencies – or elsewhere within the FBI – that have not yet been detected by internal auditors or disclosed to Congress?
 
Charlie Savage of The New York Times has reported that a source told him a digital filtering system designed to help analysts refine query results focused on foreigners was also generating results that the secret court deemed warrantless “queries” of Americans’ communications.
 
Beyond confirming these reports, the administration should answer questions, starting with:
 

• How often did these improper queries occur?

 

• How many Americans were affected?

 

• Did the FBI or any other federal agency review the contents of communications obtained through these searches?

 

• Has any American faced legal action based on evidence derived from such warrantless queries?

 
The Justice Department’s resistance is particularly troubling because it defies the public requests of both the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee to release this information. At the same time, the administration and House Speaker Mike Johnson have resisted votes on reform amendments while pushing to reauthorize Section 702 without meaningful additional safeguards.
 
Withholding this information from Congress and the American people during an active reauthorization debate displays a troubling disregard for the transparency and oversight a democracy requires.
 
During her confirmation hearing, Tulsi Gabbard pledged to restore trust in the intelligence community through greater transparency and accountability. This is her opportunity to fulfill that promise. Doing so may displease some within the intelligence establishment, but it would demonstrate a commitment to the principles she pledged to uphold – and ensure that her tenure concludes with an act of meaningful transparency.

​Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was enacted to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil. By 2021, however, when The Wall Street Journal reported that this supposedly “foreign” surveillance authority had been used to search Americans’ communications as many as 3.4 million times, it was clear that Section 702 had evolved into a tool that could permit domestic spying operations.
 
That is why Congress, in 2024, insisted on a two-year reauthorization window rather than a longer extension. The goal was to allow for closer oversight of how intelligence agencies use – and sometimes misuse – this authority. In previous reauthorization debates, House leadership permitted Members to vote on reform amendments. Speaker Mike Johnson himself did so in 2024.
 
When Congress returns next week, however, Speaker Johnson reportedly intends to continue relying on restrictive procedural rules rather than an open amendment process.
 
After losing two floor votes, Speaker Johnson appears poised to make a third attempt to reauthorize Section 702 without allowing Members to propose, debate, and vote on reform amendments. Consider the many ways in which the handling of this legislation departs from normal practice:
 

• Despite strong bipartisan support for reforms – including a warrant requirement before the government searches Americans’ communications and restrictions on government purchases of Americans’ personal digital data – House leadership has used special procedural rules to tightly control which amendments may receive floor consideration. Leadership reportedly has even considered, and may still be considering, reauthorizing Section 702 under suspension of the rules, a procedure that requires a two-thirds vote while sharply limiting debate and opportunities for amendments.

 

• The House Rules Committee, apparently at the direction of leadership, has repeatedly rejected reform amendments, including proposals requiring warrants for searches of Americans’ data. These actions represent significant departures from regular order, under which Members are generally free to offer germane amendments to major legislation.

 

• House leadership continues to pursue either a “clean” reauthorization or proposals advertised as reforms that largely restate existing law. Such measures leave untouched the central concern raised by reform advocates: warrantless government access to Americans’ communications.

 

• While sidelining surveillance reforms, House leadership has attached a ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency (CBDC) to the reauthorization package. PPSA has endorsed legislation to prohibit a CBDC. But a CBDC ban does nothing to reform Section 702. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has reportedly declared the provision “dead on arrival” in the Senate. Including this moribund proposal in the package seems disingenuous.

 

• House leadership has repeatedly scheduled votes near expiration deadlines, leaving reform advocates little time to organize support. Debate has at times stretched late into the night, literally exhausting debate and creating pressure to act quickly rather than deliberate carefully.

 

• Instead of resolving substantive disagreements, leadership has relied on a series of short-term extensions – first 10 days, then 45 days. This “rolling cliff” strategy creates artificial urgency and reduces opportunities for thoughtful analysis and debate.

 
All of this is occurring while the Trump administration continues to withhold a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion that reportedly details ongoing compliance failures and violations of laws and procedures intended to protect Americans’ constitutional rights.
 
We have to ask: Why is Speaker Johnson carrying such a heavy burden for the intelligence community? And why is President Trump – who was himself the target of surveillance abuse under a related FISA authority – allowing intelligence agencies to demand reauthorization without any meaningful reforms?
 
Before Congress reconvenes, President Trump and Speaker Johnson should consider a more constructive path. This would be one that permits open debate, allows votes on bipartisan reforms, and restores public confidence that surveillance authorities will be exercised within constitutional limits, while preserving the government’s ability counter foreign threats.
 
Now that would be a legacy.

​Would you like to know what you have at stake in the current congressional debate over the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)?
 
Do you want to understand exactly how federal agencies sidestep the U.S. Constitution to gain ready access to your communications, search histories, and data about your finances, health, romantic life, and location histories – including who you meet with, what you believe, where you go?
 
Are you looking for the plain truth about rampant government surveillance beneath Washington’s sea of acronyms?
 
Visit our new Surveillance Coalition website – fisareform.org.
 
On this site you will find a clear description of the issue, what is at stake, and the precise reforms needed.
 
Under the “Section 702 Basics” tab you will find an “Explainer” produced by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law that answers these questions:

• What Is Section 702?

 

• Whose communications does the government collect under Section 702

 

• How does the government use Section 702 as a domestic spying tool?

 

• Are backdoor searches constitutional?

 

• How have intelligence agencies abused backdoor searches?

 

• Did Congress fix the problems with Section 702 when it last reauthorized the law?

 

• How do the current administration’s actions impact concerns about backdoor searches?

 

• What can be done to protect Americans from warrantless government spying?

 

• Would a warrant requirement harm national security?

 

• What happens if Congress doesn’t reauthorize Section 702 by the deadline?

 
Under the “Resources” tab you can read incisive op-eds by leading Members of Congress and our Coalition leaders, including PPSA’s own Bob Goodlatte, in publications ranging from The New York Times and The Washington Post to The Hill – as well as our Coalition letters to Congress and the Trump administration that spell out key reforms needed to protect Americans’ privacy.
 
Finally, under the “National Security Protected” tab you can find a rebuttal to those who say that delaying the reauthorization of the FISA Section 702 surveillance authority – or placing any guardrails on government surveillance of the American people – would be dangerous to our safety.
 
We show step by step how these scaremongering claims are false – how our reforms are carefully designed to protect national security – and why the protection of the homeland can go hand-in-hand with respect for the Constitution and Americans’ privacy.
 
At the entrance of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters is an engraved inscription from the Bible: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
 
We believe that this is good advice for the American people as well.

​We don’t condone vandalism. But we have to admit that a recent event in the Texas Hill Country town of Bandera showed a flash of the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, or, perhaps more appropriately, of the settlers in the East Texas town of Gonzales who, in 1835, cried “Come and Take It!” while firing their small brass cannon at the Mexican Army.

We’re talking about the repeated efforts of the Bandera city council to install eight AI-enhanced license plate readers on poles around the town, only to have local residents use saws to cut the poles in half and take down the cameras. After several rounds of this rebellion, the city council finally gave up and ended its contract with Flock Safety, a company that is building a national network of cameras that track cars and store the daily movements of millions of Americans.

Brian McManus chronicles this contest of wills in Courier Texas.

“Bandera is the cowboy capital of the world,” one resident told McManus. “We don’t need to implement mass government surveillance in our town.”

McManus reports that Bandera has a lower crime rate than both the Texas and national averages. Banderans just didn’t like the idea of “ordinary people going about their ordinary lives in a town where everybody already knows everybody.”

There is one aspect of this story that touches on something of national significance. McManus writes:

“This was not a left-versus-right argument. It was rooted in community and the instinct toward personal liberty and suspicion of government overreach that defines much of rural Texas political identity. The irony that a surveillance state program backed by Republican state grant money ran headlong into Republican small-town resistance was not lost on people in the [city council] room.”

While Congress debates surveillance policy, it is clear that national concern about the need to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of the American people cuts across party and ideological lines.

Advocacy for reform amendments to FISA Section 702 comes from Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), as well as Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR). Can you think of any other issue that unites staunch conservatives and stalwart liberals?

All of them and many more are backing measures to keep the government’s hands off Americans’ personal data without warrants, as the Constitution requires.
​
They might agree with one Bandera resident who told McManus that surveillance “just doesn’t pass the vibe check.” Neither does the federal government’s warrantless collection and inspection of Americans’ personal data.

​Lawmakers should consider that one of the worst aspects of modern surveillance is not just its sweeping intelligence collection, or its avoidance of Fourth Amendment probable cause warrants, but also the insidious nature of its secrecy. Every year tens of thousands of Americans have their communications records scrutinized by the government, without ever learning that their private records have been searched.
 
The bipartisan NDO Fairness Act – which passed the House unanimously in 2023 – offers a practical and overdue reform. The legislation would place meaningful limits on the government’s use of non-disclosure orders (NDOs), the gag orders often served alongside warrants compelling technology companies and cloud providers to secretly hand over customer data. These orders can prevent Americans from knowing that the government has accessed their emails, files, messages, or other digital records.
 
Former House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, now PPSA’s Senior Policy Advisor, and Richard Salgado, who teaches surveillance law at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools, write in The Washington Post:
 
“A physical search is cumbersome and expensive; it requires logistics, timing and staffing. And if a homeowner challenges it, the investigation could slow down.”
 
That is just as the Founders wanted it to be. By constitutional design, searches should not be easy. But James Madison could not have imagined the Department of Justice’s Legal Process Generator, which churns out demands and boilerplate NDOs.
 
“Once a warrant is approved, the government sends it to the service provider with the gag order and waits for the zip file to arrive.”
 
Presto, change-o, you’ve been searched. And that search will remain secret, likely forever.
 
As Goodlatte and Salgado explain, notice is essential to preserving Americans’ rights. When the government secretly searches records stored with third parties and then bars providers from informing customers, citizens are deprived of any realistic opportunity to challenge improper surveillance. In an age when Americans store much of their lives in the cloud, secrecy orders increasingly wreck the constitutional balance between citizens and the state.
 
As Congress weighs whether to renew the FISA Section 702 authority, lawmakers should seize the opportunity to enact reforms that reinforce constitutional accountability rather than weaken it. The NDO Fairness Act represents exactly the kind of bipartisan, common-sense safeguard that should accompany any extension of surveillance powers.
 
Americans deserve both security and transparency. Congress should deliver both.
 
Here’s The Washington Post piece in full (paywalled).