Rep. Himes Asked Intelligence Community for Slam on The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act

U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT)

We’ve long suspected that political coordination is taking place between supposedly non-political Intelligence Community officials and their champions on Capitol Hill in opposing surveillance reform.

It is one thing to suspect such coordination. It is another to see a request for it in black and white in an official document.

PPSA received a batch of partially redacted documents in response to our June 2024 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking for communications between Members of Congress and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The Deputy General Counsel for Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the Ranking Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, emailed an ODNI Legislative Liaison Officer in 2024 about The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. The bill would restrict federal agencies from buying Americans’ private digital records from data brokers to obtain records they would otherwise need a warrant to access.

Rep. Himes’s lawyer wrote:

“Our immediate need is two to three simple unclass sentences (that we can attribute to ODNI/DNI) expressing how harmful this bill, if adopted, would be to IC activities.”

Soliciting an agency statement framed around how “harmful” the bill would be warrants scrutiny. That request raises a serious question: How much of the opposition presented to lawmakers as an intelligence assessment was solicited and provided to help defeat the legislation?

This crosses the line for both Rep. Himes and for the agency. The request is for political spin from the officially neutral bureaucracy to be used politically to kill a proposition in a legislative debate on the House floor.  

Despite the opposition, The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act handily passed the House of Representatives in April 2024. A few days later, the Senate rejected an amendment to attach the measure to a surveillance bill. This email gives surveillance reformers a concrete reason to scrutinize how intelligence agency officials seek to influence debates over any limits on their agencies.

The takeaway for surveillance reformers and our champions on the Hill is that the full force of the intelligence community is backing those who – like the anti-reform senators who made sure that The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act died in 2024 – are determined to stop any efforts at placing guardrails on the widespread surveillance of the American people.

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