United States v. Hasbajrami  US District Court, Eastern District of New York - Photo Credit: Douglas Palmer As we reported earlier this year, Judge LaShann DeArchy Hall of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that when the government searches for the communications of U.S. persons in data collected under FISA Section 702 authority, such searches are subject to the Fourth Amendment. Such searches must either be conducted after the issuance of a warrant, or meet stringent exceptions to the warrant requirement. Here is a declassified version of Judge Hall’s ruling. In a recent piece in Just Security, David Aaron, Noah Chauvin, and Courtney Otto explore the implications of this ruling for the Second Circuit and the FISA Court. They also explore the impact Judge Hall’s ruling is likely to have in Washington, D.C. “The opinion will likely also be viewed as significant in the halls of Congress, which must decide by April 2026 whether and in what form to reauthorize Section 702. During the last round of reauthorization, an amendment requiring a warrant for U.S. person queries failed in the House by a tie vote (A modified version of the amendment was voted down in the Senate by a wider margin). A key theme in the resistance to the warrant requirement, both inside and outside of Congress, was that no court to reach the merits of the issue had ever ruled that warrantless U.S. person queries violated the Fourth Amendment. Now that is no longer the case, members will face more pressure to impose a warrant requirement by statute.” Let us hope that many Members of Congress will look to Judge Hall’s bold declaration in favor of the Constitution to take a bold step of their own – to require warrants before Section 702 data can be used to spy on Americans. Comments are closed.
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