​For years PPSA has documented the increasing disposition of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to use the ever-expanding Glomar response – a “cannot confirm or deny” answer once reserved for the nation’s most closely guarded secrets – as a blanket response to any meddlesome Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
 
We should not overlook, however, another handy tool for FOIA avoidance, and that is to release the requested document but redact many or all of its meaningful parts. Now the Department of Justice Office of the General Counsel has perfected this technique, taking it to its logical end.
 
It began in 2020 when PPSA joined with Demand Progress to file a FOIA request. Our request concerned surveillance that may be taking place under no statute, but instead under a self-professed authority of the executive branch known as Executive Order 12333. The reply from the FBI is, in its own way, telling.
 
In the DOJ response, a certain Mr. or Ms. BLANK who holds the title of BLANK in the Office of the General Counsel returned with 40 pages of responsive documents. Thirty-nine pages are redacted in their entirety, as is the 40th page, with the redacted name of the signator and his/her redacted title, but with one, unredacted statement:
 
Hope that’s helpful.
 
There’s honestly no other way to take this than the Department of Justice shooting a middle finger at the very idea of a FOIA request, an exercise of the Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. This is a shame because the subject of this request is an important one.
 
Demand Progress and PPSA based our FOIA request on a July 2020 letter from now-retired Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and current Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to then-Attorney General William Barr and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. The two senators noted the expiration of Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), commonly known as the “business records” provision of FISA. The intelligence community had vociferously lobbied for the renewal of Section 215 with predictions that allowing its expiration would lead to something akin to the city-destroying scenes in the 1996 movie Independence Day.
 
Then the Trump Administration called their bluff and allowed this authority to expire. The response from the intelligence community? Crickets.
 
The sudden complacency of the intelligence community struck many as suspicious. Were federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies shifting their surveillance to another authority? Sens. Leahy and Lee seemed to think so. They wrote:
 
“At times the executive branch has tenuously relied on Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981, to conduct surveillance operations wholly independent of any statutory authorization … This would constitute a system of surveillance with no congressional oversight potentially resulting in programmatic Fourth Amendment violations at tremendous scale … We strongly believe that such reliance on Executive Order 12333 would be plainly illegal.”
 
This July 2020 letter, with a detailed series of penetrating questions about the practice and scope of 12333 surveillance, was issued by two powerful and respected members of the United States Senate … And it hit the walls of the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with all the full force of wet spaghetti. As with so many other congressional requests, this letter was not answered in any substantive way.
 
So Demand Progress joined with PPSA in October 2020, in an effort to use the law to compel an answer, this time as a formal FOIA request. We leveraged that law to request responsive documents that would reveal how the agencies might be repurposing EO 12333 to pick up the slack from the expired 215 authority, in order to spy on persons inside the United States.
 
And this is the answer we get. It can only be taken, in a general way, as confirmation that Executive Order 12333 is, in fact, being relied upon for the surveillance of people in the United States. This is one more reason why Congress should use the reauthorization of Section 702 to seek broad surveillance reform, including significant guardrails on Executive Order 12333. With mounting evidence of abuses of Americans’ civil rights, a powerful coalition of leading conservatives and liberals in Congress is building steam to do just that.
 
Hope that’s helpful.

"The government should do all it can to combat the illegal trafficking of dangerous drugs. But those efforts should not - and need not - come at the expense of Americans’ constitutional rights," writes Noah Chauvin in The Hill.

​Noah is a counsel in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law in The Hill. 

​Our bipartisan coalition is prompting former intelligence agency officials to carry the Biden administration's water by lobbying hard to kill Section 702 reform. Our Senior Policy Advisor and former U.S. Congressman, Bob Goodlatte, and Americans for Prosperity's deputy director of Federal Government Affairs, Matthew Silver, cut through the spin in RealClearPolitics. 

​Mark Davis, PPSA’s Director of Policy, recently spoke to a group of Legislative Directors for Members of the U.S. House of Representatives about the intelligence community’s opposition to House oversight of its activities.
 
Davis discussed the need to enhance Congressional oversight. The number of staffers with security clearance sufficient to help their Members review the operations of the intelligence community is sharply limited. Most House offices cannot have a staffer who obtains “top secret” and “sensitive compartmented information,” or TS/SCI clearance. Davis discussed proposals to allow every Member of the House to advance one staff member for such clearance, subject to passing a background check.
 
Davis told the Legislative Directors: 
 
“The reform of Section 702 must ensure that Congress itself has the tools to conduct necessary oversight of surveillance agencies—including sufficiently cleared staff for each Member. There are about 1.3 million intelligence community employees and consultants with top-secret clearance. It is insulting to hold, as the intelligence community does, that it would be dangerous to add a few hundred more on Capitol Hill.”

The output of former NSA officials in pushing for a “clean,” or unamended, reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been prolific. Several such pieces have recently run in the op-ed pages of The Hill newspaper alone.
 
The latest op-ed, by former senior NSA and Department of Homeland Security officials Jon Darby and Thomas Warrick, is a masterpiece of misdirection.
 
It begins with the oft-told tale of Secretary of State Henry Stimson in 1929 closing down the “Black Chamber,” a New York City office in which government cryptographers broke the codes of Japanese and other foreign diplomats. “Gentlemen,” Stimson famously said, “do not read each other’s mail.” Stimson reversed his elevated sense of etiquette when he became Secretary of War during World War Two – and the ability to break Japanese codes became central to Allied victory.
 
The implication here is that civil libertarians today who complain about Section 702 are sniffy idealists who would expose us to great danger. To buttress this point, Darby and Warrick cite several intelligence successes, including the breaking of the plot to bomb New York City’s subway in 2009. With Russia and China turning increasingly hostile, Darby and Warrick say that we need robust means to intercept those who threaten the safety of the American homeland.
 
To which PPSA and many other civil libertarians say, “hurrah!”
 
We take issue, however, with the central metaphor of their piece – Henry Stimson’s ending of foreign surveillance. No foreigner enjoys the protections of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. When it comes to foreign terrorists and spies, we say surveil away. Our concern arises when the communications of millions of Americans are folded into Section 702 surveillance.

Whenever an American becomes a target of a government investigation, a probable cause warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution to examine their communications. Take the case cited by Darby and Warrick – the planned New York City bombing involving an Afghan-American who was in communication with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and traveled to meet them. That alone should have been enough to obtain a probable cause warrant to inspect the target’s communications.
 
Darby and Warrick acknowledge that “for a time, the FBI routinely searched databases with information collected under Section 702’s authority even in non-national security investigations.” Victims of such improper government surveillance included a Member of the U.S. House, a U.S. senator, a state senator, a judge, a local political party, and 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, among many others. Darby and Warrick assure us that these abuses were “corrected” when “additional safeguards” were put in place.
 
Despite large reductions in the numbers of Americans who have their data hoovered up, however, more than 200,000 warrantless searches are still taking place every year. As Sen. Mike Lee of Utah notes, the correct number for violations of the Constitution is zero. If Congress misses this rare opportunity to impose a warrant requirement, expect the FBI and other agencies to quickly revert to old ways.
 
A final point: There is an air of unreality surrounding the debate over the Section 702 database. It is, after all, likely small compared to the database of warrantlessly obtained and inspected personal information of Americans that is commercially acquired by our government.
 
About a dozen federal agencies, from NSA, to DoD, to IRS, to the FBI, to DHS, purchase our personal data scraped from apps and sold by third-party data brokers. Government lawyers blandly assert they are not violating the constitution’s prohibition against seizing our data. They are, after all, merely buying it.
 
That strikes most Members of Congress and their constituents as sophistry. Our digital actions – whom we communicate with, where we go, what we search online for – can be our most personal information, revealing our romantic lives, our health issues, our religious beliefs and worship, and our political activities. Yet the government – including the agencies that Darby and Warrick served – routinely ransack what essentially are our personal diaries without a warrant or oversight of any sort.
 
The coming debate over the reauthorization of Section 702 will be our best opportunity in a generation to curb the government’s appetite for all our information. We should not let this rare chance pass us by.

When spy novelist John le Carré left MI-6 to become a writer, he said that he had resolved to have “nothing to do with the intelligence world.” Would that the same could be said of former intelligence community lawyers. During the relative quiet of August, attorneys who once served the alphabet soup of agencies – NSA, NSC, CIA – have been busy posting pieces and writing op-eds why Congressional reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) should be passed with minimal changes. If Congress amends Section 702 with a warrant requirement to spy on the communications of American citizens, they tell us, the nation will be in peril.
 
Civil libertarians are responding with vigor.
 
Witness the incisive piece by Patrick Toomey, Sarah Taitz, and Kia Hamadanchy of the American Civil Liberties Union in the online journal justsecurity.org, a clear-eyed response to all the recent fearmongering by this intelligence community campaign. Toomey and his colleagues offer a wide-ranging survey of Section 702 and the dangers posed by how it is used in a way that is both deep and accessible.
 
The ACLU hits the main point early and with great clarity:
 
“If the purpose of Section 702 is to ‘target’ foreigners for intelligence gathering, then officials should have no qualms about imposing robust safeguards for Americans … but for too long, officials have tried to have it both ways – claiming that the law was not intended to spy on Americans, while using Section 702 to do just that.”
 
ACLU more than amply demonstrates that Section 702 has become a “domestic surveillance tool, with agents and analysts routinely searching through the enormous pool of collected data for the private communications of Americans.” ACLU adds: “With that fact finally in the open, the rules written into the law should reflect the bedrock protections the Constitution requires.”
 
This strong piece is a welcome rejoinder. As Congress prepares to return in September, defenders of the surveillance status quo have been busy warning that a warrant requirement of Section 702 would allow Chinese and Russian agents to run rampant, or that warrants would hobble law enforcement, drowning the nation in fentanyl.
 
The ACLU’s recent piece is a sign, however, that champions of reforms are not going to let up in our corrections and rebuttals. Our coalition of civil liberties groups will be briefing leading newspapers and their editorial boards. We are reaching out to reporters to correct misleading claims and steer journalists to the right information. And we will continue to update our resource on Section 702, fisareform.org.
 
Intelligence community disinformation is, as they say, a target-rich environment. We act in the confidence that the case for warrants and other reforms will be matters of common sense and bedrock American principles for Members of Congress and their constituents.

​For years, the excuse the intelligence community has trotted out to derail surveillance reform was the need to prevent a re-building of “the wall” – shorthand for the refusal of the FBI and CIA to share information between each other, and within their own organizations – that could have stopped the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
 
This was more than a little disingenuous. There was no “wall.” There was no law or formal policy that kept these agencies from sharing appropriate alarm about flight students who wanted to learn to pilot large passenger jets, while skipping the part about landing. The 9/11 Commission appropriately put the blame on sluggish, bureaucratic behavior that allowed that awful day to happen.
 
The 9/11 excuse to avoid any and all reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) doesn’t have the same punch it used to have. So the apologists for the intelligence community are changing tack. They now argue that Congress must pass Section 702 as it is or else the nation will drown in a sea of fentanyl. A recent article in The Charlotte News & Observer demonstrates how the apologists for the status quo are now using fentanyl to lobby North Carolina’s two senators, Thom Tillis and Ted Budd, to walk away from changes to Section 702. Both senators have bravely stood up for their constituents by speaking out for the need for surveillance reform.
 
This is part of a larger effort by the McClatchy media group to run stories, from The Miami Herald to The Kansas City Star. That nationwide series links senators skeptical about Section 702 to the assertion that a Section 702 probable cause warrant requirement would degrade law enforcement’s ability to stop fentanyl distribution.
 
No one disagrees that the smuggling of this deadly drug into the United States is a national crisis. It is estimated that 150 Americans die every day from synthetic opioid poisoning. Fentanyl, which can be 50 times more potent than heroin, is particularly dangerous. PPSA and other civil libertarian groups agree that fighting fentanyl smuggling and marketing is a major national struggle that law enforcement should be fully engaged in countering.
 
But these efforts by the intelligence community smack of fear-mongering. We are adamant in our conviction that we can fight fentanyl without throwing out the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures of our personal information. Section 702 enables surveillance of foreign nationals for national security purposes. Because all communications are global, and many Americans have conversations with foreigners, millions of Americans have their data caught up in 702’s dragnet.
 
And, as we have seen, the FBI and other agencies have warrantlessly accessed the personal information of Americans millions of times in recent years – including the personal data of political leaders, that of a U.S. senator, a House Member, a state senator, and a judge.
 
Here’s a tip for the FBI: no Member of Congress is engaged in the smuggling and distribution of fentanyl. What excuse, then, does the FBI have for intruding into the personal communications and data of leading politicians? Perhaps Sens. Tillis and Budd might want to ask the intelligence community questions about that.
 
The bottom line is that the FBI and other agencies should be able to prosecute fentanyl smugglers and sellers and respect the U.S. Constitution at the same time.
 
“The reform debate is about this program’s broad intrusion on Americans’ privacy,” ACLU’s Patrick Toomey told The News & Observer. “If the purpose of Section 702 is to target foreigners for intelligence purposes, as officials often say, then they should stop stonewalling robust protections for Americans.”

​A 2006 German film, The Lives of Others, created a vivid portrait of what it is like to live in a surveillance state – in this case, in old East Berlin under the watchful eye of the Stasi secret police. PPSA has catalogued all of the ways in which technology and thoughtless (and sometimes malign) government intentions bring us closer to living, if not exactly under the Stasi, to something closer to the panopticon in China.
 
A broad array of robust surveillance technologies is in use around the country – from drones, to ubiquitous private and public cameras, to purchased data owned and reviewed without warrants by government for insights into American’s relationships, location histories and communications, to the warrantless treasure trove of American data in FISA’s Section 702. All that’s lacking is the will and means to knit them all together, with AI technology to perform the menial task of constant surveillance for its human minders. With the emergence of local “fusion centers” around the country to integrate data, the United States is already well down this path.
 
But another key element of a surveillance state, also amply demonstrated by old East Germany, was the willingness – sometimes the eagerness – of people to inform on others. Sometimes the informer was a former lover, a disgruntled neighbor, or a coworker with a grudge to settle. The Stasi was always willing to overlook the motivations of an informer if they had something good and juicy.
 
This is not to say that the decision by financial institutions to volunteer – without any legal process – the confidential banking information of their clients to the FBI makes them Stasi informers or puts us all in Stasi land. Like almost all Americans, banking executives were appropriately horrified by the savage attack on the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob on January 6, 2021. Herein lies the danger – many loopholes in the law begin with a real, legitimate public outrage and the need to rectify it. But when major public and private institutions violate their customers’ reasonable expectations of privacy, in a way utterly outside the law, we normalize illicit behavior that can be used again in the future – and stretched beyond reason – for any purpose.
 
Thanks to the investigations of the Judiciary Committee and its Weaponization subcommittee, we now know that major financial institutions voluntarily conducted a dragnet of vast numbers of customers and gave it apparently unprompted to the FBI and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). According to retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, banks “with no directive from the FBI data-mined … customer base” and compiled massive information on customer transactions. Any customer who used a credit or debit card between Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, 2021, in the greater Washington, D.C. area, had their personal information swept up and sent to the FBI.
 
Financial institutions also took an extra step to put anyone who had ever purchased a firearm on the top of that list. Documents obtained by Congressional investigators suggest that the executive branch was brainstorming informal methods – again, outside of any legal process – to obtain even more private customer information from financial institutions.
 
No matter how heinous the acts of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol, this privately conducted dragnet relied on no law to report to the FBI the personal information of large numbers of innocent Americans with no connection whatsoever to that crime.
 
Now Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has subpoenaed Citibank for documents and communications related to violations of customer privacy. PPSA commends Chairman Jordan. Big corporations must not arrogate to themselves the ability to violate the privacy of their customers without disclosure or paying a price in the civil courts, as well as in the court of public opinion.
 
Chairman Jordan and his committee are performing a necessary duty to nip this practice in the bud before businesses of all sorts begin to volunteer to a sometimes over-reaching government the private information we entrust to them.

​Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) recently fired off a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray holding the Bureau to account for its abuses of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on American citizens through improper, warrantless searches. The senator points to the “growing list of abuses that have come to light committed by the employees of your agency and the apparent lack of public accountability.”

Sen. Scott’s letter comes on the heels of a tidal wave of reports detailing rampant misbehavior in the FBI. To cite a recent example, PPSA reported on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion that revealed the FBI has spied on high-level U.S. officials, including a U.S. senator, a state senator, and a judge. (The FBI had previously been caught examining the communications of Rep. Darin LaHood, Republican from Illinois). Sen. Scott wrote: “The most recent revelations of frequent and repeated abuses … by the FBI raise concerns for the American public that there are no limits—legal or otherwise—on your investigative powers even when it comes to spying on American citizens.”
 
Sen. Scott’s letter was as substantive as it was critical, requesting the FBI to “explain the accountability for those rogue agents who conducted those illegal queries,” as well as a copy of the range of “‘possible’ disciplinary actions that could be implemented through ‘a new policy of escalating consequences.’”
 
Sen. Scott put it best when he concludes, “the American people and their elected representatives in Congress want to believe in their government and deserve nothing short of full transparency and accountability from the FBI.”
 
PPSA hopes the FBI will respond to this letter with more humility than the mixture of hubris and defensiveness that characterize the communications of Director Wray.

​Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel, today announced the filing of an administrative appeal with the Department of Justice after a “ludicrous scavenger hunt response” from the FBI to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
 
PPSA had submitted this FOIA request in mid-June asking for documents from DOJ law enforcement agencies. PPSA sought records about the use of administrative subpoenas, which are often used to collect bulk data rather than aim at an identifiable target for a specific reason, as required by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. These subpoenas are often used without any showing of probable case.
 
To learn more about this practice, PPSA requested documents concerning when DOJ uses administrative subpoenas, “whether and when it has used them without probable cause, when it has used them as alternatives to a court-ordered subpoena, and when DOJ shares data obtained through administrative subpoenas with other federal or state agencies.”
 
But the FBI couldn’t trouble itself to search for any records. Instead, the FBI blithely directed PPSA to rummage through the voluminous documents on its online “Search Vault,” suggesting that there could be responsive records somewhere in that database.  The FBI never suggested that all responsive records would be found in the Vault.   
 
“The FBI’s scavenger hunt response is ludicrous,” Schaerr said. “PPSA sought records reflecting the FBI’s use of administrative subpoenas with and without probable cause. In both instances, the request did not require the FBI to do anything other than search for records concerning the use of administrative subpoenas, and how those subpoenas addressed the presence or absence of probable cause.”
 
Schaerr cited a precedent, Miller v. Casey (1984), that the FBI is bound to read a FOIA request as drafted, not as agency officials might wish it was drafted.
 
“The FBI’s willful refusal to search is a legal error,” Schaerr said. “The FBI might want to avoid the work FOIA requires of it, but we are hopeful the Director of Information Policy at DOJ, and beyond that if necessary, the courts, will recognize that the law does not recognize exceptions for inconvenience.”
 
PPSA awaits responses from other DOJ components, ranging from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

​The Heritage Foundation recently published a sweeping take on FBI reform by Distinguished Fellow Steven Bradbury that amounts to ripping up the current structure of the Bureau and starting over. There is much to appreciate in this iconoclastic report, with far-reaching changes that warrant careful review on Capitol Hill.
 
Here are some of Bradbury’s more intriguing proposals to “reimagine the FBI from the ground up”:

• Both a “complete makeover” of the existing agency or the establishment of an entirely new agency that would absorb the FBI’s intelligence functions are presented. With the latter, reformers could separate the FBI’s intelligence function from law enforcement, creating a new agency, perhaps akin to Britain’s MI6. This makes sense given that in FISA’s Section 702, for example, we see foreign intelligence and national security used as justifications for domestic snooping. Separation would focus the FBI on its principal purview of domestic crimes, although care would have to be taken not to erect silos that could lead to another 9/11.

 

• The report calls on Congress to limit the tools of investigation used by the Bureau and prohibit efforts to suppress free speech, religious liberty, and other constitutional rights. Under the plan, Congress could restrict the FBI’s authority to conduct assessments of Americans without any evident connection to a possible crime. Congress could restrict the FBI’s ability to stimulate or induce Americans into engaging in criminal activity, a sensible reform given the FBI’s history of entrapment and sometimes becoming itself entrapped.

 

• Bradbury suggests Congress should rebalance the FBI’s operational staff away from its D.C. headquarters and towards the field offices. Such moves would both structure the FBI so as to force the agency to focus on domestic law enforcement, as well as help remove it from the Beltway’s political ecosystem. The latter reform may go some way towards depoliticizing the agency and help restore Americans’ trust that the agency stands apart from “the swamp.”

 

• One suggestion should make privacy advocates everywhere cheer – it calls on the Attorney General to isolate and purge all information improperly collected on Americans by the FBI or other components of the Department of Justice. While this reform would go a long way towards preventing further violations of Americans’ privacy rights, it would first rely on another of the Heritage report’s more questionable suggestions – that the FBI should be placed within the DOJ’s chain of command for more effective management and control. On one hand, the FBI is in sore need of oversight and accountability. On the other hand, bringing the FBI into the DOJ’s chain of command could risk further politicization.

 
In addition to these structural changes, the report proposes a minimum set of actions required to end the FBI’s abuses of its authority. Worthy and sensible recommendations include reforms to insulate the FBI from the Section 702 program, to require the FISA Court to appoint an amicus in all politically sensitive cases involving U.S. persons, and to improve oversight of politically sensitive FBI investigations.
 
PPSA commends Heritage for thinking outside of the Beltway box; however, countering FBI abuses is just one Washington element in need of reform. We are hopeful Congress will also focus on reforming Section 702, end warrantless data purchases, and address other abuses of Americans’ civil liberties.

​PPSA is asking a DC federal court to compel the top federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to search for records related to how they acquire and use the private, personal information of 110 Members of Congress purchased from third-party data brokers.
 
In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in July, 2021, PPSA had asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the CIA for records related to the possible purchase and use of commercially available information on current and former members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
 
The request covered such leading Members of Congress as House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Ranking Member Jerry Nadler, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, and former Members that included Vice President Kamala Harris and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
 
PPSA’s motion for summary judgment filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia confronts the assertion by these multiple agencies that to even search for responsive documents would harm national security.
 
PPSA’s motion notes that under FOIA, “agencies must acknowledge the existence of information responsive to a FOIA request and provide specific, non-conclusory justifications for withholding that information.” The agencies instead stonewalled this FOIA request by invoking the judge-created Glomar response, meant to be a rare exception to the general rule of disclosure, which allows the government to neither confirm nor deny the existence of such records.
 
“Requiring Defendants here to perform FOIA searches within the secrecy of their own silos does not, by itself, compel the automatic disclosure of any information whatsoever," PPSA declares in its motion. “[B]ecause the initial step of conducting an inter-agency search makes no such disclosure, their arguments are neither logical nor plausible justifications for shirking their duty to perform an internal search.”
 
The issue of government spying into the private, personal information of Members of Congress, tasked with oversight of these agencies, involve the serious potential for executive intimidation of the legislative branch. The ODNI recently declassified an internal document noting that commercially available information can be used to “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.”
 
“The government doesn’t even want to entertain our question,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel. “What do they have to hide?”

​PPSA previously commented on a New York Times scoop in April that revealed a contractor for the U.S. government had purchased and used a spy tool from NSO, the Israeli firm that developed and released Pegasus software into the wild – which can turn smartphones into pervasive surveillance tools.
 
The White House was surprised that its own government did business with NSO a few days after the administration had put that firm on the no-business “Entity List.” NSO was placed on this blacklist because its products, the U.S. Commerce Department declared, “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
 
Understandably upset, the White House tasked the FBI to sleuth out who in the government might have violated the blacklist and used the software. Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, and Adam Goldman of The Times report that months later the FBI has come back with a definitive identification of this administration’s scofflaw.
 
The FBI followed the breadcrumbs and discovered, you guessed it, that it was the FBI.
 
Fortunately, the FBI did not purchase the “zero-day” spyware Pegasus, but another spy tool called Landmark, which pings the cellphones of suspects to track their movements. The FBI says it used the tool to hunt fugitives in Mexico. It also claims that the middleman, Riva Networks of New Jersey, had misled the FBI about the origins of Landmark. Director Christopher Wray discontinued this contract when it came to light.
 
Meanwhile, The Times reports that two sources revealed that contrary to the FBI’s assertions, cellphone numbers were targeted in Mexico in 2021, 2022, and into 2023, far longer than the FBI says Landmark was used.
 
We should not overlook the benefits of such FBI investigations. In fact, PPSA has a tip to offer. We suggest that the FBI track down the government bureau that has been routinely violating the U.S. Constitution by conducting backdoor searches with FISA Section 702 material, as well as warrantlessly surveilling Americans purchased data.
 
More to follow.

With perfect timing, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court in DC provided the U.S. Senate today with ample to reason to follow the example of the House and pass the PRESS Act. The judge seeks to compel CBS News senior correspondent Catherine Herridge to reveal her confidential source or sources for a news series she published when she was a journalist at Fox News.
 
Confidentiality is the lifeblood of a free press. From Watergate to Harvey Weinstein, confidential sources have helped journalists bring to light malfeasance and hidden crimes that otherwise would have continued. And a strong reporting culture is a counter to the growing surveillance state enabled by technology. That is why in September 2022, the House unanimously passed the bipartisan Protect Reporters from Exploitive State Spying, or PRESS Act – and why the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved it again on July 19 of this year.
 
This measure would bring the federal government up to speed with 49 states by shielding reporters from choosing between jail or ratting out whistleblowers and sources as ordered by a federal judge or prosecutor. The PRESS Act is reasonable legislation, allowing for exceptions in extreme cases.
 
PPSA has long admired Catherine Herridge’s impartial and fearless reporting. We support her and all journalists who face these dilemmas. This is all the more reason why the House should again pass this bill and the U.S. Senate should take up the PRESS Act when Congress returns after August recess.

July was a banner month for surveillance reform. For years, civil libertarians have warned about the widespread practice of third-party data brokers selling Americans’ most sensitive and private information, scraped from our apps, to more than a dozen federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the many agencies of the Department of Homeland Security.
 
The public is alarmed. Lawmakers in both parties are beginning to take effective action.
 
In July, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously passed The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which would restrict the ability of government agencies to warrantless extract Americans’ personal information from data purchases. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is reintroducing this measure in the Senate.
 
If the will of the Congress wasn’t clear enough, also in July the House passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Sara Jacobs (D-CA) to the National Defense Authorization Act that expressly prohibits half of the intelligence community, including the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, from purchasing our data at all, absent a warrant, court order, or subpoena.
 
Supporters of similar reforms range from the conservative Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan, to the liberal Ranking Member and former Chairman, Jerry Nadler. A passion for surveillance reform brings together respected members from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), from Sen. Wyden to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
 
It might seem, then, that surveillance reform is now a slam-dunk certainty. It isn’t.
 
Consider the fate of Lee-Leahy, a bill that would have imposed the rather modest goal of requiring the judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to seek the advice of civil liberties experts in cases that involve significant civil rights concerns when political, religious, or journalistic groups are surveilled and investigated. That measure passed the Senate in 2020 by an overwhelming 77 votes. Then, through a process of legislative confusion and the Trump Administration’s policy contortions, this modest and popular bill sailed into the round file like a paper airplane.
 
The Davidson-Jacobs Amendment and The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act risk dying in a far less dramatic way than Lee-Leahy did. All the elected champions of the surveillance state have to do is let these measures die in the darkness of a committee room or the Senate calendar. More good legislation has been killed by benign neglect than by explicit filibusters.
 
Any American who cares about privacy and civil liberties must draw two conclusions from this realization.
 
First, now more than ever, civil libertarians need to ramp up the activity. Members of Congress must know that this year we won’t settle for feel-good, symbolic votes. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act must get a floor vote in the Senate.
 
Second, civil libertarians must continue to insist that FISA’s Section 702, an authority under which the government surveils foreigners, must be reformed so that it cannot continue to be used by the FBI and other agencies as a domestic surveillance tool. This reform must necessarily include closing the legal loophole that allows the government to buy our personal information and thumb through it, all without a warrant.
 
As Kenny Loggins sang so long ago, “this is it!” Our back is to the corner. Join the efforts of the civil liberties community by clicking here to stand up and fight!

​The unanimous passage of the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act by the House Judiciary Committee, as well as the expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is spurring the National Security Agency into a furious lobbying campaign of the public and Congress to stop surveillance reform.
 
NSA lobbyists argue that it would be hobbled by the House measure, which would require agencies to obtain a probable cause warrant before purchasing Americans’ private data. Former intelligence community leaders are also making public statements, arguing that passage of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with any meaningful changes or reforms would simply be too dangerous.
 
George Croner, former NSA lawyer, is one of the most active advocates of the government’s “nothing to see here, folks” position.
 
In March, Croner portrayed proposals for a full warrant requirement as a new and radical idea. He quoted two writers that concern over warrantless, backdoor searches is a concern of “panicky civil libertarians” and right-wing conspiracy theorists. In a piece this week, Croner co-authored a broadside against the ACLU’s analysis of the NSA’s and FBI’s mass surveillance.
 
For example, Croner asserts that civil liberties critics are severely undercounting great progress the FBI has made in in reducing U.S. person queries, a process in which agents use the names, addresses, or telephone numbers of Americans to extract their private communications. Croner celebrates a 96 percent reduction in such queries in 2022 as a result of process improvements within the FBI. 
 
But, to paraphrase the late, great Henny Youngman, 96 percent of what? Ninety-six percent of a trillion data points? A quadrillion? The government’s numbers are murky and ever-changing, but the remaining amount appears, at the very least if you take these numbers at face value, to constitute well over 200,000 warrantless searches of Americans.
 
Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice, who has placed her third installment in a series on Section 702 in the online outlet Just Security – a masterclass on that program and why it must be reformed – has her own responses to Croner. While Croner portrays a warrant requirement for reviewing Americans’ data as a dangerous proposal, Goitein sees such a requirement as way to curb “backdoor searches,” and return to the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment.
 
Goitein writes:
 
“For nearly a decade, advocates, experts, and lawmakers have coalesced around a backdoor search solution that would require a warrant for all U.S. person queries conducted by any U.S. agency. Indeed, some broadly supported proposals have gone even further and restricted the type of information the government could obtain even with a warrant.”
 
She describes a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies that included many, like former CIA acting director Michael J. Morrell, who are anything but panicky civil libertarians. This group nevertheless found it responsible to recommend warrants “based on probable cause” before surveilling a United States person. Other supporters of probable cause warrants range from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), to Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Mike Lee (R-UT), and former Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA).
  
They all saw what Goitein describes:
 
“Without such a measure, Section 702 will continue to serve as an end-run around the protections of the Fourth Amendment and FISA, and the worst abuses of the power to conduct U.S. queries will continue.”
 
We eagerly await ACLU’s response to Croner’s critique. Such debates, online and perhaps in person, are the only way to winnow out who is being candid and who is being too clever by half. It is a healthy development for intelligence and civil libertarian communities to debate their clashing views before the American people and the Congress rather than leave the whole discussion to secret briefings on Capitol Hill.

On Friday, the ACLU fired a full salvo at the FBI after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released two court opinions that detail blatant violations of Americans’ privacy, including a sitting state court judge. The opinions come from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and describe how the entire national intelligence community, not just the FBI, performed numerous violations of legal requirements and court-ordered rules intended to protect Americans’ privacy. 
 
The FISC writes that the FBI repeatedly engaged in prohibited searches of Section 702 databases for information pertaining to unsuspected targets. The opinions also demonstrate the evolving uses of Section 702: the NSA is reportedly using its Section 702 powers “to conduct routine, suspicionless searches of people overseas who are applying for immigration benefits or seeking to travel to the United States.” The FISC notes the unprecedented nature of this kind of use for Section 702. The data of millions of Americans who are in contact with people seeking to come to the United States will surely be swept up by this new trend.
 
Patrick Toomey, former U.S. Senator and Deputy Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said that “These disturbing new revelations show how Section 702 surveillance, a spy program the government claims is focused on foreign adversaries, is routinely used against Americans, immigrants, and people who are not accused of any wrongdoing.” 
 
PPSA is astonished by the revelations disclosed by these two FISC opinions. The latitude for abuse of surveillance powers has only grown. Meanwhile, more and more Americans are being caught in the crossfire. Congress must act now to secure the privacy rights of Americans everywhere.

​On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion that details blatant violations of Americans’ privacy. Most distressingly, high-profile American political leaders were among the targets surveilled by the FBI. The heavily redacted opinion released on Friday reveals that the FBI attempted improper searches of the communications of a United States Senator, a state senator, and a judge who complained about civil rights violations by local police. 

If that sounds beyond the pale, the National Security Division (NSD) of the United States Department of Justice thought so, too. 

In the former case, the NSD determined that the “querying standard” used by the FBI to obtain foreign intelligence information was not met. In the latter case, it’s a little more opaque. Last October, the FBI used the anonymous Judge’s social security number to search the Section 702 database. The Judge "had complained to FBI about alleged civil rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police.” The National Security Division’s review stated that this search was also illicit. 

While the U.S. Senator has been notified about the improper search, the state Senator and the state Judge have not. It is clear is that a continued pattern of government abuse persists when it comes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 

Although the FISC states that, “there is reason to believe that the FBI has been doing a better job in applying the querying standard,” the anonymous judge also admits that “[t]he prevalence of non-compliant queries conducted by the FBI, and particularly of broad queries that were not reasonably likely to return foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime, has been a major focus of concern….”

Indeed it has been. In fact, the same court found in 2018 that there was a “deficiency in the FBI’s querying and minimization procedures” based on “large-scale, suspicionless queries….”

The Court found that the FBI’s implementation of remedial measures has improved the Bureau’s compliance with Section 702’s specificity requirements. But they make sure to soften that finding with a disclaimer: “NSD devotes substantial resources to its oversight efforts, but still can examine only a fraction of total FBI queries. It is therefore possible that serious violations of the querying standard have so far gone undetected.” 

The FBI has a long track record of repeatedly misusing the Section 702 database, but to poll information on high-profile elected officials is a new level of abuse. These revelations come amid a push by the Biden administration to reauthorize Section 702 mere months before it expires at the end of this year. When federal authorities inappropriately attempt to spy on legislators – and even judges – we truly find ourselves with one foot off the merry-go-round. Congress must take this into account in the coming months. 

​A recent article by Dell Cameron at Wired reports on ongoing congressional efforts to close the federal loophole allowing police and intelligence authorities to collect sensitive personal data from United States citizens without a warrant, subpoena, or court order. 

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, sponsored by Representative Warren Davidson with bipartisan support, would prevent government entities from purchasing Americans’ personal data without court authorization, dramatically restricting a practice that even the Director of National Intelligence admits has tremendous potential for abuse. The bill passed out of committee with flying colors following markup. 

In Wired, Cameron aptly explains the many controversies surrounding this issue, including the ongoing game of legal pretzel logic the government has used to justify its continued purchase of consumer data for law enforcement purposes. As the author points out, not only can the government access these data, so too can private companies and foreign actors. 
But, as PPSA Senior Policy Advisor Bob Goodlatte notes in the piece, it’s our own governing authorities with which we should be most concerned.  

Goodlatte said, “None of those other entities can arrest you, can charge you with a crime, try you, sentence you, imprison you, restrain you, enjoin you, fine you, tax you. All of those are powers of government, and any American should be concerned about the ease with which the federal government can gather information about people.”

With the biggest privacy battle of the year yet to come in the form of reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Fourth Amendment advocates can take comfort that these issues are getting the attention – and coverage – they deserve. 

​Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel, in testimony before a House subcommittee on Friday, urged Congress to assert its prerogative to interpret Americans’ privacy and Fourth Amendment rights against the federal government’s lawless surveillance.
 
Schaerr said the reauthorization of a major surveillance law this year is a priceless opportunity for Congress to enact many long-needed surveillance reforms. There is, Schaerr told the Members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Government Surveillance, no reason for Congress to defer on such a vital, national concern to the judiciary.
 
Congress also needs to assert its authority with executive branch agencies, he said. For decades, when Congress reforms a surveillance law, federal agencies simply move on to other legal authorities or theories to develop new ways to violate Americans’ privacy in “a game of surveillance whack-a-mole.”
 
Schaerr said:
 
“As the People’s agents, you can stop this game of surveillance whack-a-mole. You can do that by asserting your constitutional authority against an executive branch that, under both parties, is too often overbearing – and against a judicial branch that too often gives the executive an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Please don’t let this once-in-a-generation opportunity slip away.”   
 
Schaerr was joined by other civil liberties experts who described the breadth of surveillance abuse by the federal government.
 
Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School said that FISA’s Section 702 – crafted by Congress to enable foreign surveillance – has instead become a “rich source of warrantless access to Americans’ communications.”
 
She described a strange loophole in the law that allows our most sensitive and personal information to be sold to the government. The law prevents social media companies from selling Americans’ personal data to the government, but it does not preclude those same companies from selling Americans’ data to third-party data brokers – who in turn sell this personal information to the government.
 
Federal agencies assert that no warrant is required when they freely delve into such purchased digital communications, location histories, and browsing records. Goitein called this nothing less than the “laundering” of Americans’ personal information by federal agencies looking to get around the law. 
 
“We’re a nation of chumps,” said famed legal scholar and commentator Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School, for accepting “massive violations” of our privacy rights. He dismissed the FBI’s recent boasts that it had reduced the number of improper queries into Americans’ private information, likening that boast to “a bank robber saying we’re hitting smaller banks.” 
 
Many members on both sides of the aisle echoed the concerns raised by Schaerr and other witnesses during the testimony. Commentary from the committee indicates that Congress is receptive to privacy-oriented reforms.
 
Gene Schaerr cautioned that Congress should pursue such a strategy of inserting strong reforms and guardrails into Section 702, rather than simply allowing this authority to lapse when it expires in December. Drawing on his experience as a White House counsel, Schaerr said the “executive branch loves a vacuum.” Without the statutory limits and reporting requirements of Section 702, the FBI and other government agencies would turn to other programs, such as purchased data and an executive order known as 12333, that operate in the shadows.
 
Despite this parade of horribles, the hearing had a cheerful moment when it was interrupted by the announcement of a major reform coalition victory. The Davidson-Jacobs Amendment passed the House by a voice vote during a recess in the hearing, an announcement that drew cheers from witnesses and House Members alike. This measure would require agencies within the Department of Defense to get a probable cause warrant, court order, or subpoena to purchase personal information that in other circumstances would require such a warrant.
 
Schaerr was optimistic that further reforms will come. He said:
 
“Revulsion at unwarranted government surveillance runs deep in our DNA as a nation; indeed, it was one of the main factors that led to our revolt against British rule and, later, to our Bill of Rights. And today, based on a host of discussions with many civil liberties and other advocacy groups, I’m confident you will find wide support across the ideological spectrum for a broad surveillance reform bill that goes well beyond Section 702.”

​Earlier today the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act out of committee by a 30-0 unanimous vote, with one abstention. PPSA applauds Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Nadler, and the Members of the Committee for taking this important step to protect Americans’ privacy. 
 
“Stopping the government from spying on Americans by buying their sensitive personal information from data brokers is a critical part of the government surveillance reforms Congress is working towards this year,” said Bob Goodlatte, PPSA Senior Policy Advisor and former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “As Congress considers the reauthorization of Section 702 of FISA, it should hold strong to the principle that no surveillance authorities should be reauthorized without closing the data broker loophole. The Committee’s overwhelming, bipartisan, unanimous approval of the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act sends a strong signal in that regard.” 
 
Our digital devices can tell everything about us – who we visit, what we like and believe, who we befriend, where we go, our medical concerns, and other personal information.
 
The government is required by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to obtain a warrant before it can seize our personal information. But the government has found a workaround to the Constitution – law enforcement, intelligence, and other federal agencies spy on us by simply buying our personal information from shady data brokers. The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act will close this loophole and prevent the government from sidestepping our constitutional rights.
 

In 2020, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), embarrassed by the many lapses uncovered by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, ordered the FBI to take steps to ensure greater consistency and accuracy in its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications. How have the Bureau’s efforts progressed? As we reported in September of that year, the FBI was developing a new system, known as “the Bridge,” that would increase collaboration within the FBI, as well as between the FBI and the DOJ Office of Intelligence, to improve compliance with the law on surveillance. The Bridge will automatically cross-reference new data with existing data in FBI’s current case-management system, Sentinel.
 
The Bridge was slated to be completed around the end of 2021. Two years later, the Bridge is reportedly nearing completion and will finally be ready by the end of this year. The FISA Court ordered the FBI to provide quarterly updates about the status of the Bridge’s development. Now, PPSA has learned from documents supplied in response to Freedom of Information Act requests that the FBI has decided that it no longer wants to provide the court with updates on the development of its technology.
 
The FBI recently delivered a motion for relief to the court to be relieved from having to submit these two-page reports. Instead, the FBI wants to notify the court whenever “the Bridge has completed its long-term testing and has been fully implemented,” or when “there are any substantive updates to report.” This mode of reporting is not a good sign for the court’s imposition of an oversight obligation on the FBI, allowing the Bureau to decide when and how it wants to comply with the FISA Court.
 
Thus, a quarterly two-page report constitutes an unbearable onus for the FBI. When the Bridge is already years late and the FBI has a track record of failing to hold itself accountable, can we really trust the agency to do its due diligence without renewed oversight?

In today’s House Committee Judiciary hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) expertly revealed the extent to which the FBI is unwilling to publicly discuss its use of commercially available information (go to 1:10:50 mark).
 
Rep. Jayapal asked the director about his claim before the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the FBI had previously purchased Americans’ location data information from internet advertisers but had stopped the practice. Why, then, Jayapal asked, did a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reveal that the government continues to purchase Americans’ personal data scraped from apps and sold to the government by third-party data brokers?
 
The report was surprising for its frankness. An ODNI panel admitted that such data can be used to “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.”
 
Rep. Jayapal asked how the FBI uses such data. Director Wray responded that this is too complex to cover in a short exchange. He said there are so many precise definitions that he had best send “subject matter experts” from the FBI to give Rep. Jayapal a briefing, presumably behind closed doors and under classified rules that would prevent public discussion.
 
Rep. Jayapal then went on to note that more than historic location data is at stake. Purchased data, she said, include biometric data, medical and mental health records, personal communications, and internet search histories and activities. She asked Director Wray: Does the FBI have a written policy on how it uses such commercially available information?
 
Director Wray did not seem sure. He replied that he would be happy to provide a private briefing.
 
Rep. Jayapal next asked if there is an FBI policy for using purchased information against Americans in criminal cases.
 
Once again, Director Wray punted.
 
After Rep. Jayapal was finished, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), said that her remarks were “well said,” and promised a bipartisan approach on the issue. Speaking for Republicans, Chairman Jordan told Rep. Jayapal, chair of the progressive caucus, “you have friends over here who want to help you with that.”
 
We suggest that a bipartisan next step could be an open hearing with the FBI’s experts on how much purchased information is obtained and how it is used.

​ACLU is celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendments by highlighting a floor statement President Joe Biden made as a U.S. Senator in 2008.
 
In his Congressional Record submission, Sen. Biden declared the measure that we would come to know as Section 702 as “constitutionally infirm.” He voted against it. Sen. Biden’s words would be a better guide to President Biden’s surveillance policies than those advocated by his appointees and representatives today.
 
For months now, the administration’s representatives on Capitol Hill have argued that Section 702 of FISA should be reauthorized without changes or reforms. FBI Director Christopher Wray and others have, with the backing of the president, made this case even though, by the administration’s own admission, this authority meant by Congress to authorize surveillance of foreigners located abroad has been used in 246,000 targeted searches of Americans’ communications.
 
While we should not uncritically accept the government’s numbers, and the definitions and assurances behind it, let’s take the government’s number as a minimum. The question remains why the government believes 246,000 violations of Americans’ civil liberties is acceptable. That number constitutes millions of civil rights violations in a few years and more violations than there are people in a sizable city, say, Richmond, Virginia.
 
As a U.S. Senator, Joe Biden foresaw problems with Section 702. He complained that the law authorized only weak judicial oversight by the FISA Court, beholden to the good faith of executive branch officials. Sen. Biden said the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence would certify after the fact to the FISA court that they had good reason to believe targets were located outside of the United States, “regardless of how many calls to innocent American citizens inside the United States were intercepted in the process.”
 
“This would be a breathtaking and unconstitutional expansion of the President’s powers,” Sen. Biden said. Now those powers are in the hands of President Joe Biden.
 
As senator, Joe Biden set out an overarching principle we’d all be wise to remember:
 
“One of the defining challenges of our age is to combat international terrorism while maintaining our national values and our commitment to the rule of law and individual rights. These two obligations are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they reinforce each other.”
 
PPSA has been hearing as much from Congressional leaders, from Democrats as well as Republicans.
 
Our point is not to slam Joe Biden for inconsistency, but to sharpen the debate for Members of Congress. The president was right the first time: We can have protection from terrorists and spies without jettisoning our civil rights. We can reform Section 702 so it will work within the guardrails of the Constitution.