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:
“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. Will Tulsi Gabbard Release the Report Before She Leaves Office?  ODNI Director Tulsi Gabbard. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore 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:
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.  Speaker Mike Johnson. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore 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:
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. Check Out FisaReform.org to Learn About Your Stake in the Ongoing Surveillance Debate in Washington5/26/2026
 Screenshot of http://www.fisareform.org/ 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:
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). Throwing Out the Baby (Privacy) With the (Robocall) Bath Water  Robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the public’s frustration with them is entirely justified. Consumers should not have to endure endless scam calls, spoofed numbers, and invasive solicitations. Reasonable regulation of commercial robocalling is both necessary and constitutional. Businesses do not have a First Amendment right to anonymously bombard Americans with sales pitches, demands for personal information, or manipulative solicitations. At the same time, the effort to curb robocalls should not come at the expense of the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. Mike Pearl at Gizmodo reports that some critics fear the FCC’s proposed cure “might be worse than the disease,” at least from a privacy standpoint. It’s already the case that tracking technology has made traveling in our vehicles far from the anonymous refuge it once was. According to watchdog groups, the FCC’s plan could have a similar effect on phone communications by creating what Ken Macon of Reclaim the Net describes as “an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.” Among the FCC’s proposed changes are restrictions that could effectively eliminate burner phones while imposing extensive identity-verification requirements on customers. Telecom law firm Wiley reports that both new and returning customers could be required to present government IDs and provide physical addresses, legal names, and alternate phone numbers. “High-volume” customers could face even more scrutiny, including disclosure of IP addresses and intended phone usage. There is a meaningful distinction, however, between anonymous commercial solicitation and the legitimate use of privacy-protective communications tools by ordinary people. Businesses making robocalls to sell products or collect data should be regulated. But burner phones and other forms of semi-anonymous communication also serve lawful and socially valuable purposes. These include:
According to Phil Clark at Mashable, the FCC’s proposed “red flags” are broad enough to encompass many ordinary and lawful activities, including using virtual offices, paying with cryptocurrency, maintaining unusual email addresses, or having phone numbers not tied to residential addresses. Critics worry that such criteria could sweep too broadly and normalize extensive identity tracking for routine communications. The challenge for policymakers is to strike the right balance. Americans deserve meaningful protection from robocalls and phone scams. But regulations aimed at bad actors should be carefully tailored so they do not create a universal government registration system for everyone who purchases or uses a phone. Canada’s “Lawful Access” Bill Raises Alarm in Congress Over Encryption and Americans’ Privacy5/18/2026
 Two powerful House committee chairmen are warning that a sweeping Canadian surveillance proposal could undermine the privacy and cybersecurity of Americans by pressuring U.S. technology companies to weaken encrypted services. At stake is the privacy of Americans who depend on robust encryption to protect sensitive communications, health data, financial records, and personal communications from unwarranted intrusion. In a May 7 letter to the Canadian Minister of Public Safety, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast expressed concern that Canada’s proposed “Lawful Access Act of 2026,” known as Bill C-22, would dramatically expand the Canadian government’s ability to compel access to encrypted data. The lawmakers wrote: “Canada’s Bill C-22, currently under consideration in Parliament, would drastically expand Canada’s surveillance and data access powers in ways that create significant cross-border risks to the security and data privacy of Americans … “Bill C-22 would allow Canadian government officials to compel American companies to build backdoors into their encrypted systems, thereby introducing systemic vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers, foreign adversaries, and cybercriminals.” At the center of their concern is the requirement for “electronic service providers” to enable government access to data. The bill also authorizes confidential “ministerial orders” compelling providers to comply with demands, while prohibiting disclosure of those orders. “Dangerously Vague” Jordan and Mast argued that these powers are dangerously vague and compel weakening of encryption technologies. They wrote: “If a U.S.-based provider is forced to redesign its system to facilitate Canadian authorized access to content that is currently inaccessible even to the provider itself, the resulting capability cannot be geographically limited.” This could open the way for hostile actors and states to steal Americans’ data at a massive scale. The chairmen referenced the 2024 “Salt Typhoon” intrusion as evidence that government-mandated access points inevitably become attractive targets for hostile actors. Privacy and civil liberties advocates are voicing similar concerns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that Bill C-22 would provide “a mechanism for the Minister of Public Safety to demand companies create a backdoor to their services,” while Meta stated publicly that the bill could “break, weaken, or circumvent encryption.” Endangers the Vulnerable PPSA has long warned that mandates weakening encryption in one democratic nation inevitably create ripple effects far beyond national borders. Breaking secure encryption could endanger journalists, dissidents, religious minorities, businesses, attorneys, and ordinary citizens from criminals and hostile foreign actors alike. Jordan and Mast urged Canada to pursue formal cooperation mechanisms under the CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act framework, which allows cross-border access to digital evidence while preserving legal safeguards and judicial oversight. As Congress debates surveillance reform at home, the dispute over Canada’s Bill C-22 underscores a growing international reality – efforts by governments to weaken encryption abroad can directly threaten the privacy and cybersecurity of Americans at home. House Appropriations Committee Advances Privacy Protections Against Data Brokers and AI Surveillance5/14/2026
 The House Appropriations Committee took a big step toward closing one of the most dangerous loopholes in modern surveillance practices. On Wednesday, lawmakers adopted an amendment by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) that would prohibit the government from buying Americans’ sensitive personal data from data brokers without judicial oversight. The amendment mirrors the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, legislation previously passed by the House in 2024 with strong support from members of both parties. The issue is straightforward: Federal agencies increasingly obtain Americans’ location histories, browser records, app usage, and other sensitive digital information by purchasing them from private data brokers rather than seeking a warrant from a judge. This practice is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. And yet, this is a common practice in the federal government. Agencies from the FBI to the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense routinely use commercially available data to obtain information that otherwise would require a judge-issued warrant. PPSA has long opposed these practices and supported reforms aimed at curbing warrantless surveillance. Our efforts have focused not only on traditional government data collection but also on the rapidly growing ability of artificial intelligence systems to aggregate and analyze commercially purchased data into detailed personal dossiers. “AI tools can now synthesize purchased location records, browsing behavior, buying history, social media activity, and other streams of data into comprehensive profiles of Americans’ lives, associations, religious practices, political activity, and daily routines,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Senior Policy Advisor to PPSA. “A government agency that cannot legally compel a person to turn over information directly should not be able to purchase it indirectly from a data broker.” The “data broker loophole” has become one of the defining privacy controversies of the digital age. As multiple civil liberties groups and lawmakers have noted, the government increasingly treats commercially available data as exempt from constitutional scrutiny, even when that same data reveals the whole of a person’s movements and activities. The bipartisan concern surrounding this issue has been building for years. The original Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act drew support from lawmakers as ideologically diverse as Reps. Warren Davidson, Jerry Nadler, Thomas Massie, and Zoe Lofgren, as well as Sens. Mike Lee, Ron Wyden, and Rand Paul. In 2024, the House passed this legislation by a bipartisan vote of 219-199. Now the Espaillat amendment revives that effort, marking continued momentum for privacy protections, especially in the current debates over Section 702 surveillance authority in Congress. “Most heartening of all, the House Appropriations Committee’s actions show that support for surveillance reform is broad, deep, and bipartisan,” Goodlatte said. “At stake is a basic constitutional principle – the federal government should not be allowed to pull out its wallet and buy its way around the Bill of Rights.” Watching the Watchers: “A Surveillance State for Purposes You Like Is Still a Surveillance State”5/12/2026
 “Even committed border watchers who favor stronger enforcement of immigration rules should have qualms about the deployment of surveillance state capabilities by the government,” writes J.D. Tuccille in Reason. “Tools and techniques adopted for one purpose are inevitably redirected to others.” Tuccille goes on to round up recent news articles that underscore his point.
EPIC reports that scanned protesters have lost TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status for travel. Tuccille writes: “In itself that may not sound like a big deal, but it means the federal government is willing to identify and retaliate against people for exercising constitutionally protected rights. That can extend to even more severe consequences.” As Congress returns this week to resume the debate on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – an authority enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but often used to spy on Americans – Members would do well to take stock of just how much the surveillance state has grown. Tuccille concludes: “Ultimately, there’s no such thing as a single-purpose surveillance state. There’s just the misuse and abuse of the government’s ability to monitor and identify people who come to its attention.”  Pictured: Jimmy Carr. PHOTO CREDIT: Eamonn Forde, bigissue.com As Congress debates surveillance policy, there is increasing focus on the role of artificial intelligence in weaving together disparate strands of information to create “total informational awareness.” The elements of an American surveillance state are clearly falling into place. To illustrate this danger, we often point to revelations from the secret FISA court, reports from the intelligence community, and surveillance scandals unearthed by journalists. But today we point to the words of Jimmy Carr, a British and Irish comedian. There is no denying that Carr is truly funny, though his jokes can sometimes cross the line from edgy to reprehensible. Carr is also truly bright. This Cambridge graduate shared some sobering insights about the nature of AI and freedom on the UK free speech podcast Triggernometry clips. When asked about the threat of AI, Carr noted the “one rule of history – unintended consequences.” He continued: “People are worried about the wrong thing with AI, in my humble opinion. People are worried about losing their job. It’s a perfectly valid thing to worry about, but I think you’re worried about the wrong thing … “The cost of running an authoritarian regime, like the Stasi, has come down by 10 orders of magnitude in the last three years … When you had to run their Stasi, if you were in East Germany back in the day, it was like 20 percent of the GDP [spent] on spying on people and keeping an eye out. “Now you’ve got a bunch of cameras, you’ve got AI, everyone’s got a phone on them, and we’re tracking everything at all times. Okay? That’s a worry, because we live in liberal democracies, and we’re very lucky too. But our leaders, how long will they resist that temptation?” He then turned to the dangers of digital identification. “There’s lots of lessons from history about digital ID, that we should take very seriously. Because even if the good guys are in charge when it comes in, well, at what point does the world turn and people vote for a bad guy? And then they have the power.” Carr underscored this point with one devastating observation: “More Jews died in the Netherlands than in France. You know why? Better records.” Carr quoted Thomas Sowell, who said: “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.” Carr added that “safety and freedom” are the tradeoffs of our times. He asked: “Where do you want to draw that line?” Carr concluded: “Civilization is a clearing in the forest. We need to stand very firm against any authoritarian regime, whether it comes from the left or the right, whether it comes from a good place or a bad place. We have to resist that.”  The Associated Press last year wrote a landmark series of six stories about the role that U.S. tech firms play in global surveillance, particularly in China. “Made in America, Watched Worldwide,” just won a Pulitzer for international reporting. The award is richly deserved, honoring the efforts of multiple journalists who worked painstakingly on the project for three years. Celebrating their efforts is an opportunity for all of us in the privacy community to reflect not only on the AP’s key findings but also on the ominous realization that the technology described is homegrown. In other words, it can just as easily be sold to U.S. agencies and directed at the American people. That’s over 90,000 distinct entities when you add up the total number of federal, state and local government operations. In other words, U.S. technologists not only helped design the Chinese surveillance state, we’re also not that far from having one ourselves. This danger is growing more acute with the ability of AI to transform information into actionable knowledge and to turn individual data points into personal dossiers. So let’s think about that as we briefly summarize the AP’s topline findings. Everything in this list is all-too-easily capable of being implemented here in the United States:
One of the heroes of AP’s reporting is longtime Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo. Arrested and imprisoned as a student leader during the Tiananmen protests, the now-U.S. citizen Zhou testified before Congress in 2024, warning that the lack of privacy guardrails and meaningful reform “is a strategic failure by the United States.” Current legal guardrails on American surveillance are not keeping pace with advancing technologies and questionable partnerships unmasked in AP’s series. And that gap underscores the urgent need for robust reform of surveillance laws – before these untethered AI networks are fully (and permanently) turned inward. Congress should take a deeper look into the technologies U.S. companies are selling to China and other adversarial nations – and how they are being deployed here. The rapidly escalating power of AI should especially make it clear why the House leadership proposal to extend FISA Section 702 for three years is unacceptable. Does That Make It Okay for American-Made Cars to Spy on Us as Well?  If Chinese-made cars are “surveillance packages on wheels,” as one U.S. senator warns, then Americans should ask a harder question: Why are we comfortable driving surveillance packages built at home? Why You Currently Can’t Buy Chinese Cars China’s BYD electric cars are a marvel. Well-crafted with roomy interiors, stuffed with lots of high-tech bells and whistles, and efficient charging, they would, if sold in the United States, provide tough competition to American-made electric cars. But you cannot buy a BYD in the U.S. market. They are still banned under a Biden-era rule forbidding Chinese automotive software and hardware, along with a prohibitive 100-percent tariff on Chinese cars. Now President Trump is reported to be considering a deal with PRC leader Xi Jinping to allow China to enter into U.S. joint ventures with American automakers to make them here. A Bill to Outright Ban Chinese Cars Enter Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), who have introduced the Connected Vehicle Security Act, which would ban Chinese-made connected vehicles and their hardware and software components from the American market. What do they mean by “connected”? These senators note that Chinese-made cars can collect, process, and transmit the geolocation, operational, and personal information of drivers and passengers. That is why Sen. Slotkin, who served in the Central Intelligence Agency before entering politics, called Chinese cars “surveillance packages on wheels, with the ability to collect on American citizens and sensitive sites.” The bill’s language not only targets these cars for their espionage potential, but also – more alarmingly – for the possibility of their “remote takeover” on American roads. It is likely no coincidence that these two senators are from two states known for their U.S. car plants and large electoral blocs of American autoworkers. Sen. Moreno, who owned car dealerships before his election, said that “the fate of the American auto industry and countless autoworkers depends on” a ban on Chinese cars. Clearly, protectionist sentiment is at play here. But it is also undeniable that Sen. Slotkin is right – Chinese-made goods incorporate surveillance as a feature, not a bug. As we’ve reported, even Chinese-made toasters and baby monitors are a concern. With cars, as with toasters, “Made in China” should come with the warning “Watching from China.” American Cars Are “Surveillance Packages on Wheels,” Too The senators’ proposal overlooks the built-in surveillance features of cars made in America, as well as those from friendly allies like Japan, Korea, and Germany. Cars to be sold next year must adhere to the Biden-era drunk driver detection systems. In a new car in 2027, if you appear to be impaired – perhaps rattled because you urgently need to drive someone to the ER – you might find your car disabled by a kill switch. Privacy advocates are alarmed by proposals to use cameras and microphones to scan drivers for signs of impairment. Would conversations be recorded and kept in a database? Would every passenger be logged as well? Even now, the seats in our cars record our weight, and our GPS systems and tire-pressure monitoring systems track, record, and report where we go. Given China’s recent behavior, skepticism about Chinese software and hardware on the roads is well deserved. And certainly Xi’s regime is nothing if not malevolent toward America. But let’s not kid ourselves – automotive surveillance is a Made-in-America threat to privacy, too. Congress should hit the brakes – or at least establish guardrails – on the surveillance systems in the cars we already drive every day. Colorado Man’s Flock Nightmare  Futurism and other sources report that Kyle Dausman can’t go anywhere in his truck without being swarmed by police. It’s all thanks to a glitch in the Matrix – er, in the Flock Safety camera surveillance system – used by authorities across the state of Colorado. Seriously, this is one of those stories that would be a lot funnier if it were about an average guy named Klaus who lived in the East German police state circa 1986. After stopping him a couple of times, the Cherry Hills Police Department quickly realized that a dubious clerical strategy was responsible for flagging local resident Dausman in the statewide Colorado Crime Information Center database. Because the Centennial State, like others, uses both zeroes and letter Os in license numbers: “Sometimes the data entry will be for both" versions of a plate when an arrest warrant is issued, Cherry Hills police chief Jason Lyons told Denver’s KUSA. A clerk filing a warrant in another county apparently did exactly that in Kyle Dausman’s case, entering both the “0” and “O” versions of the actual offender’s tag, according to the Cherry Hills chief. He also noted, pointedly: "It wasn't a mistake.” Poor Dausman just happened to be the guy with the innocent-yet-incorrect tag sequence. "Everywhere in the state, every time I pass a camera,” laments the victim, “they get alerts in their car that I'm in the area." He justifiably worries for his family’s safety as well as his own. Colorado should order its clerks to stop conflating zeros and Os. Why does the state – like many others – continue to put innocent people in harm’s way? This could be fixed with one executive order from the governor. At least the local police department in Cherry Hills fixed the flag in its local database. But beyond that, Dausman is on his own, and largely without recourse according to the details of various reports: The Colorado Crime Information Center hotlist still shows him as a wanted man, and no one is sure who has the actual authority to address the situation. All of which is to say nothing of actual reform (which lives only on best practice wish lists for now). Dausman’s experience, writes Al Landau for Gadget Review, is emblematic of a fundamental problem with large-scale, big-data-powered surveillance systems like the Flock Safety networks popular across Colorado: “Flawed data produces harmful results, regardless of camera sophistication.” A process, he says, that amplifies bad data practices, potentially turning them into “major personal nightmares.” Like a coal miner’s canary, this story warns not just about the anti-privacy plate-reader industry, but about the dangers of public partnerships with Big Tech that fuels the growth of the modern surveillance state. In the meantime, privacy-loving pro-Fourth-Amendment citizens who want to keep tabs on Flock’s invasive alliances with law enforcement can do so on an advocacy site appropriately called DeFlock. How “Ghost Tapping” Can Pull Cash Out of Your Accounts – and the Best Ways to Guard Against It5/5/2026
 Like so many high-tech conveniences, tap-to-pay comes with some privacy and security pitfalls. The same debit and credit cards that have this capability can also be remotely exploited by “ghost tapping,” a hack that can drain funds from your bank accounts in seconds. Click below to get a quick overview of this risk, along with a review of ways to protect your cards – what these solutions cost and how well they work.  The recent drama in the House and Senate on surveillance reform had more reversals than an episode of the original Game of Thrones series, lots of verbal swordplay with both sides switching places on the Iron Throne. The Legislative Twists and Turns The House leadership succeeded on Wednesday evening in passing a three-year extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This would have amounted to a three-year vacation from oversight for an authority that was enacted by Congress to enable surveillance of foreign threats on foreign soil, but that has also been used by the FBI for warrantless domestic spying on the American people. Yet, a number of House reformers bought into this offer by House leadership, which cleverly attached a promised ban on the creation of a “central bank digital currency.” We applaud this idea but deplore the cynicism behind this tactic. It is true that such a digital currency would end any semblance of financial privacy, giving the government the means to track every transaction by every American in real time. We knew, however, that the anti-digital currency proposal was already dead on arrival in the Senate. It was a shiny but worthless object. Sure enough, Senate Majority Leader John Thune declared the digital currency provision a “poison pill” for Section 702 reauthorization. On Thursday the Senate quickly passed a short-term “clean” reauthorization of Section 702 – for 45 days – which then went back to the House. We are grateful that many of PPSA’s reform allies took to the House floor to complain that Congress is still considering a clean reauthorization bill that offers no substantive reforms at all. What is the state of play now? The issue of whether or not to attach reforms to Section 702 remains unresolved. Thus the Iron Throne remains empty and open to capture by either side. The battle over surveillance reform resumes in when Congress returns in a week and is likely to continue through mid-June. What Was So Bad About the House Leadership’s Proposal A three-year gap before the next reauthorization of Section 702 would be an excessive delay before the next opportunity for Congress to debate and exercise meaningful oversight over the intelligence community. The regular reauthorization debate – the last one was a mere 18 months ago – is the only opening in the legislative calendar for reformers to press for a warrant requirement for government inspection of Americans’ communications under programs authorized by Section 702. It is the only vehicle by which reformers can press to end the warrantless purchase of Americans’ personal data by federal agencies from shady, third-party data brokers. And it is the only leverage Congress has to narrow a 2024 provision that allows the NSA to secretly compel countless small businesses and houses of worship to spy on customers and congregants. Just as bad, a three-year delay before the next reauthorization debate would leave the intelligence community free to evade scrutiny while it turbocharges its practices with the astonishing privacy-destroying power of AI. Imagine what AI surveillance might look like between now and 2029. We told all of this to Members of Congress, and many responded with alarm. We were encouraged that the three-year extension passed the House by only a slim margin. The vast majority of Democrats opposed the reauthorization, and 22 Republicans stood up to Speaker Johnson’s absurd three-year delay before the next surveillance debate as well. The Struggle Ahead Between now and mid-June, we will continue to work with other civil liberties organizations to educate Members of Congress about surveillance abuse. More and more Members of Congress seem to be getting the message. We exposed the weakness of many so-called reform proposals and the realities of surveillance abuse on our website. This last week, for the first time, the number of visitors to our website topped more than 1 million views, including 402,000 first-time visitors. PPSA peppered Congress with email blitzes detailing the deficiencies of leadership proposals that were long on cosmetics but short on substance. We were delighted to see that the open rate of PPSA’s Key Vote Alerts to senators, representatives, and staff reached 42 percent, far above the industry average of around 15 percent. Most important of all, PPSA worked to keep you up to speed, with our website, social media outreach, virtual briefings, and our newsletter on the intelligence community’s latest shenanigans. Our voice on Capitol Hill would not be heard without you. You answered our call to blitz congressional offices with your emails and calls – and the result can be seen in the fact that surveillance reform lives to fight another day. So thank you for your support of PPSA. And above all, thank you for showing up when we issued calls to action by contacting your representatives in Congress. With your efforts, surveillance reform is still in play. With your continued support, we will stand our ground for Americans’ privacy. Fingers crossed.  Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's campaign, said he doesn't want to turn over documents because he fears they will be leaked. PHOTO CREDIT: CNN Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: Hell, yes. Carter Page, a former foreign policy advisor to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, will be paid $1.25 million to settle claims for surveillance that resulted from an FBI that knowingly made untruthful claims against him before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) Court. At a time when history is measured in news cycles, this may seem like ancient history to many in Washington. And yes, the Page debacle concerned Title I of FISA, a different surveillance authority from the FISA Section 702 authority, whose reauthorization is now the subject of intense debate in Congress. But the Carter Page ordeal is well worth revisiting. It does, in fact, have a lot to say about the current Section 702 controversy. The Essentials of the Carter Page Debacle The FBI obtained four improperly obtained surveillance orders from the secret FISA Court to surveil Page. Under the law’s “two hop” rule, these orders not only allowed the FBI to spy on Page; they also allowed the FBI to spy on anyone Page communicated with (such as the Trump campaign manager) and anyone that person communicated with (the candidate himself). One doesn’t have to be an admirer of Donald Trump to find it beyond dangerous for the FBI to investigate a presidential campaign, and ultimately the candidate himself, in the middle of a national election. This is especially true when we consider that the whole investigation was predicated on lies the FBI told the court, accompanied by a forgery in the form of a document altered by an FBI attorney. Does that sound overwrought? Consider: The four secret surveillance orders were the direct result of the Department of Justice and the FBI committing acts of omission and commission in their representations to the FISA judge in 2016 and 2017. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz – a Democrat, by the way – conducted an exhaustive investigation that identified 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions in each of the four applications.” The FBI, in its surveillance application for Page, did not inform the court that the basis of its suspicions – an intelligence report produced by a dodgy ex-MI6 officer, Christopher Steele – was something that the Bureau itself had concluded was completely unreliable. Indeed, the “Steele dossier’s” most salacious report, that Russian intelligence had a “pee tape” of Trump cavorting with micturating prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room, was later determined by Horowitz’s investigation to have started as a bar joke. Not only did the FBI know that the basis for probable cause presented to the court was sketchy, but it also falsified evidence. Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith would later plead guilty to altering an email from the CIA that he had submitted as evidence to the court. What had been altered? The court asked if Carter Page had a connection to the CIA. He had, in fact, been a secret operational contact for the CIA, which had given Page its highest rating for dependability. The FBI attorney altered that CIA document, changing it from affirming Page’s relationship with that agency to denying it. Some Obvious Conclusions We admit to feeling a little personal about this. PPSA attorneys have represented Page in his quest for justice. We can attest that Page – who was subjected to repeated FBI interrogations and a day-long examination before a grand jury – spent months in a lonely, personal hell. Had Page made the slightest mistake in his recollections, he could have been sentenced to years in federal prison. He deserves every penny of this settlement. But the takeaway for the public and every Member of Congress – Democrats as well as Republicans – should be what this story tells us about Section 702. It has been revealed that under Section 702, the FBI secretly surveilled U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives, a state judge, political and religious organizations, and journalists. If the FBI is willing to be this disingenuous before a federal judge, just imagine what it might be willing to do with the communications of everyday Americans obtained by Section 702 programs that are usually warrantless and lack direct judicial oversight of individual queries. Far from being ancient history, the Carter Page ordeal is a constitutional cautionary tale – one Congress ignores at the peril of every American’s Fourth Amendment rights. Chatrie v. United States  The U.S. Supreme Court set the first warrant requirement for Americans’ location data in 2018. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority in Carpenter v. United States, declared that when the government “tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near-perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user.” Though the Court’s ruling set a warrant standard for the extraction of historic cell phone data from cell towers, Carpenter failed to become a general precedent for using other means to geolocate Americans – such as tracking people through their phones. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that has the potential to become the next landmark ruling. If the sharp questions of the Justices are any indication, they may well limit the government’s ability to conduct large geolocation sweeps that can compromise the privacy of large numbers of Americans. The case involves Okello Chatrie, convicted of bank robbery near Richmond, Virginia, after local authorities used a geofence warrant for the area of that crime and picked up Chatrie’s phone at the scene. Hundreds of other people within the area geofenced by police were also pinned, including guests at a Hampton Inn, residents in an apartment house and a retirement home, and diners at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant. What’s the big deal, you ask, if this maneuver helped catch a bank robber? As a lower court judge noted, with such a procedure – this time a warrant issued to Google – everyone within the designated perimeter “has effectively been tailed.” Even when such technology is used for a clear purpose, such as locating a bank robber, the precedent opens the way for the government to track Americans’ associative activities, from protests to political activity to worship. In its questioning, the Supreme Court recognized the Orwellian possibilities of this technology. “What’s to prevent the government from using this to find out the identities of everybody at a particular church, a particular political organization,” Chief Justice Roberts asked the government’s lawyer. “What are the restraints that would prevent that from becoming a problem?” Adam G. Unikowsky, Chatrie’s attorney, characterized geofence warrants as fishing expeditions that “search first and develop suspicions later.” Unikowsky told the Justices: “The technology may be novel, but the constitutional problem it presents is not. The potential for abuse is breathtaking: The government need only draw a geofence around a church, a political rally or a gun shop, and it can compel a search of every user’s records to learn who was there.” The Justice Department lawyer had a tough time arguing that Chatrie did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for location history data that his phone shared with Google. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor asked questions showing a concern that the government’s position could be expanded to include emails, photos, and documents, as well as location data. The Justices also questioned the extent to which Americans are even aware that their cell phones enable tech companies to track their locations in a way that can be shared with the government. These questions echoed the PPSA amicus brief, in which we told the Justices: “Letting a plumber into your house to fix a sink does not mean you have no expectation of privacy when the police come knocking.” A little levity came to the proceedings when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said she was shocked by how many ads she saw on her phone that were triggered by her visits to specific locations. “I need to check my location settings, plainly,” she said, triggering laughter throughout the courtroom. Judging by the questioning, it appears that this case may, at the very least, lead to some tightening of mass geofencing. PPSA hopes that all the Justices will agree with our brief in which we declared: “The Founders would have been shocked to see privacy brought to this sorry state.” Warning to House Leadership: The American People Are Ready to Erupt Over Surveillance Abuse4/27/2026
PICTURED: Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and Majority Leader Steve Scalise
In the seven years that PPSA has tracked developments in federal surveillance programs, we’ve witnessed a quantum leap in public understanding and concern about our government’s warrantless domestic spying.
When we began, we had to explain that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a legal authority enacted by Congress to permit surveillance of foreign targets on foreign soil. We went on to explain that this foreign surveillance authority had been expanded by the intelligence community to make warrantless searches, called queries, of Americans’ personal communications that get sucked into the NSA’s global trawl of data. We now find that most Americans we talk to have a good understanding of this. And they are not happy about it. By 2023, four out of five Americans were insisting on strong surveillance reform. In the last reauthorization of Section 702 in 2024, awareness and alarm had grown so much that a warrant requirement for the authority failed in the House in a tie vote. Sixty percent of Republicans – a majority of the majority – voted for that warrant requirement. This week, the House will likely vote on Section 702 reauthorization. The big decision will be whether House leadership will allow Members to vote on reform amendments, or whether they will try to ram through the basic authority ornamented with sham “reforms.” 
As this happens, we are pleased to see so many Republicans and Democrats taking a stand against what is essentially a clean, or reform-free, reauthorization. Four out of five Americans are in favor of strong surveillance reform. That concern is now so deep that it has begun to percolate into state legislative campaigns.
Enter Vic Meyers, a Democratic candidate for Colorado House District 47. Meyers read a Washington Post report in 2023 that the FBI misused Section 702 nearly 300,000 times in 2020 and 2021, including searches involving people arrested at protests. He is now proposing a law to forbid Colorado from collecting bulk data or sharing it with the federal government. Meyers says in a recent YouTube post: “Think about how long it would take you, or you and 100 others, to conduct 300,000 searches of data collected on Americans, and remember that was just one agency in just over one year that we know about. That kind of data mining is only possible because of AI …” “If you're thinking, well, hey, Vic, I don't talk to people overseas, think again. “Customer service calls, scam emails, call centers. You don't control where your data goes. These are the kinds of things that could put your communications into a government database. I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to trade any of my liberty just for the simple possibility of more safety …” We hear the same sentiments from innumerable Republicans as well. Leaders in Congress ignore the explosive level of concern about warrantless federal surveillance at their peril. They would be well advised to include reasonable reforms that allow plenty of room for government to respond to emergencies, terrorism, cybersecurity, and other immediate threats. If a clean reauthorization does occur this week, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for the intelligence community. A populist, bipartisan volcano is rumbling. It would be foolish to ignore it. Speaker Johnson’s New FISA Section 702 Reauthorization Proposal – Weaker Sauce in a New Bottle4/27/2026
This Proposal Has No Warrant Requirement and Only Window-Dressing “Reforms”  Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore After a spectacular failure to push through an extension of FISA Section 702 in the middle of the night late last week, Speaker Johnson is now advancing a proposal that would do next to nothing to protect the millions of Americans whose emails, texts, and other communications have been caught up in the FISA database and read by the FBI and other government agencies, all without a warrant. Speaker Johnson’s proposal forbids the “targeting” of U.S. persons for initial data collection under Section 702. But Section 702 already prohibits targeting U.S. persons. What it doesn’t prohibit is collecting and reading millions of Americans’ communications that get “incidentally” sucked into the NSA’s global trawl of data. In short, the proposal is a diversion that restates existing law as a reform, the policy equivalent of fool’s gold. Notably, the proposal also does nothing to protect everyday Americans whose geolocation, online search history, and other sensitive personal information are routinely purchased by the FBI and other government agencies without a warrant. It also leaves intact an absurdly broad definition of “electronic communications service provider” under Section 702 that allows the NSA to compel millions of entities – from commercial landlords to everyday businesses and even houses of worship – to assist in Section 702 surveillance. And it does nothing to strengthen amicus participation in the FISA Court to protect civil liberties. Minor Tweaks Instead of Reforms The bill’s so-called “reforms” primarily consist of tweaks to existing intelligence agency procedures. Rather than installing constitutionally mandated standards and safeguards, such as warrants issued by a judge, the Speaker’s proposal makes modest changes to the internal procedures of executive branch agencies. Three Years Before the Next Debate Is Too Long in the Age of AI The proposal would delay the next reauthorization of Section 702 for three years. With the rapid evolution of AI and its ability to sort individuals’ data into personal dossiers, giving the government a blank check to spy on Americans for three more years is far too long. The regular reauthorization cycles of Section 702 are the only real remaining leverage Congress has for meaningful surveillance reform. One or two years would be an acceptable reauthorization length, but three is a bridge too far. The House Has Alternatives In 2024, 60 percent of Republican House Members voted in favor of a robust warrant requirement. Last week, a House majority opposed a “clean” reauthorization. This is in keeping with the vast majority of the American public that supports a warrant requirement. It is time for Members to demand an up-or-down vote on real reform amendments to Section 702. And it is time for Speaker Johnson to give it to them. Contact Your Representative Click here to tell your U.S. Representative in the House that any reauthorization of FISA Section 702 must include serious reforms to curb the government’s spying on innocent Americans. How to Get Up to Speed on the Section 702 Debate – and Let Your Voice Be Heard on Capitol Hill4/23/2026
 At 2 a.m. on Friday, the House of Representatives did something rare in Washington. It said no. A deeply flawed proposal to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act went down in flames – and deservedly so. That bill would have imposed a weak, cosmetic warrant standard that would have made privacy protections worse, not better. It would have also reauthorized this authority for another five years, denying Congress a vehicle for oversight and debate over evolving surveillance technologies and practices until 2031. We’ve since heard the intelligence community and its champions spread the word to the media and on Capitol Hill that Friday’s failed reauthorization was caused by irresponsible “obstructionism” fomented by the extremes of both parties at the expense of national security. That’s nonsense – hogwash, even. On Friday, the House voted 228-197 to shelve Speaker Mike Johnson’s deeply flawed “clean” version of Section 702. Even that substantial bipartisan majority didn’t fully reflect the will of the more than three-fourths of Americans who support a warrant requirement before the government can collect and review Americans’ private communications. Why shouldn’t a majority of the majority have the right to vote on reforms again? After the Friday night version of Section 702 failed, both houses of Congress voted to extend that surveillance authority to the end of April. This gives Congress and the public time to fully grasp the ends and outs of this debate. Here are three expert resources to do just that: What Is Section 702 – What Does It Do and Why Is It So Important? Liza Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice has produced a clear, readable primer on Section 702. She sets out the purpose and structure of this surveillance authority. She gives solid answers about how the government uses Section 702 for backdoor searches, and how a warrant requirement for Americans’ data in Section 702 would contain reasonable exceptions that would continue to protect national security. Why Congress Must Act Two respected U.S. senators, conservative Mike Lee (R-UT) and liberal Democrat Dick Durbin (D-IL), took to the pages of The New York Times to lay out how much is at stake in the Section 702 debate. These senators note that FBI agents in recent years have searched for the communications of political protesters across the ideological spectrum, Members of Congress, a congressional chief of staff, a state court judge, multiple U.S. government officials, journalists and political commentators, and 19,000 donors to a political campaign. How Does the Data Broker Loophole Violate Our Privacy? Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) in The Hill highlights a parallel threat: federal agencies’ purchases of Americans’ most sensitive and personal information from third-party data brokers. Rep. Davidson writes: “Data brokers compile detailed dossiers on millions of Americans, aggregating location histories, browsing activity, app usage, and financial transactions into comprehensive profiles of daily life. This data could be used to create a gun registry by tracking purchase information, or target parents attending school board meetings, or identify people engaged in other First Amendment-protected activities.” Good Reform Proposals on the Table There is no shortage of serious reform proposals. The Lee-Durbin Security And Freedom Enhancement Act is a compromise that would pair reauthorization with meaningful Fourth Amendment safeguards. In the House, Rep. Davidson and Zoe Lofgren’s (D-CA) Government Surveillance Reform Act offers the most comprehensive reform of surveillance law in decades. Other proposals include Rep. Andy Biggs’s legislation, the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act. All of these amendments would curtail the government’s ability to grasp and exploit our personal information at will. Security and Liberty Are Not Opposites No one disputes the importance of monitoring foreign threats. Section 702 will – and should be – reauthorized. But it must be reformed to prevent its use as a backdoor surveillance tool for a domestic spying operation. If you agree, please register your opinion with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Click here to tell House Speaker Johnson that we can have both national security and respect for the U.S. Constitution. Please drop any attempt at a clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702 that rejects reasonable domestic surveillance reforms.  As the House debates the extent of domestic surveillance of the American people under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, our representatives should note a breaking story – that the FBI has investigated the Cato Institute and its employees for years. Of course, no one is above the law and anyone who appears to have committed a crime can be investigated. But the Cato Institute? Really? This libertarian think tank attracted luminaries like Nobel Prize-winning economists, including the late Milton Friedman and the late Friedrich Hayek. Its policy papers, podcasts, and videos stand out for their quality of writing and the depth of their research. In a city where many nonprofit public policy institutes are little more than dressed-up public relations shops, Cato fellows are notable for their intellectual integrity and fearless honesty. In 2019, the FBI responded to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Cato fellow Patrick Eddington by swearing that it had “no records” on the organization. On April 15, the FBI reversed course, admitting under pressure from federal Judge James Boasberg that it has investigated Cato employees and the Institute itself for years for potential crimes. What could these crimes be? Improper footnoting? Misuse of p-values in statistical analysis? Eddington writes: “You will search the public record in vain to find any indictment, federal criminal charge, or prosecution of any current or former Cato Institute employee or any charge against the Institute itself for any violation of federal law … “These are two distinct but reinforcing problems: an active criminal investigation running in parallel with classified intelligence collection, both shielded from disclosure, both targeting a prominent First Amendment organization, with no public prosecutorial output to show for it. “So we now have a publicly filed, sworn declaration confirming an active, years-long FBI criminal investigation potentially targeting Cato employees – with zero public record of any resulting indictment, charge, or prosecution spanning what appears to be a timeframe that runs at minimum from before the original 2019 FOIA request through the present. That’s a potentially very long-running investigation of an IRS-recognized, prominent public policy organization engaged in First Amendment-protected activity that, as far as public records reflect, has produced nothing in the way of charges.” Eddington concludes: “This is precisely the fact pattern that has historically characterized politically motivated surveillance operations conducted under color of law.” Many on the left also complain that the FBI has subjected their First Amendment organizations to undue scrutiny. Something to think about before the House accepts a rule that would allow no reform amendments to the Section 702 surveillance authority. Date & Time
Apr 23, 2026 10:30 AM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) Description The Path to Reauthorizing Section 702 of FISA Thursday, April 23, 2026 10:30 - 11:30 am ET Last week, Congress passed a 10-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), pushing the sunset date to April 30. As Congress considers the future of FISA Section 702 and weighs potential privacy reforms ahead of that deadline, this bipartisan briefing will help distill legislative proposals, key reforms, and recent developments. Section 702 of FISA was enacted in 2008 to broaden the scope of FISA, authorizing the government to collect the communications of non-U.S. persons located abroad. In practice, however, Americans’ communications are frequently swept up in these collections and later accessed through warrantless queries. As Congress considers reauthorization, it is important to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights by closing the backdoor search and data broker loopholes. We will be joined by former Congressman and chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Bob Goodlatte (now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability), Liza Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justices’ Liberty & National Security Program, Don Bell, policy counsel at The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, and and Molly Powell, Senior Policy Analyst at Americans for Prosperity. The panel will be moderated by Amanda Beckham, Government Relations Director with Free Press. Panelists:
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