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. Comments are closed.
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