President Biden signed a reauthorization bill on Saturday a key US surveillance law after divisions over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to seek data on Americans nearly forced the statute to expire.
With just shy of the midnight deadline, the Senate had approved the bill by a vote of 60 to 34 hours earlier with bipartisan support, extending the program for two years. known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Mr. Biden thanked congressional leaders for their work.
“On time, we're reauthorizing FISA right before it expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said as voting on the final passage began 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day we pushed and pushed to try to get a breakthrough and in the end we got it.”
What is FISA Section 702?
US officials have said the monitoring toolfirst authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, it is crucial to disrupting terrorist attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage, and has also produced intelligence that the US has relied on for to specific operations, such as the 2022 slaughter of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.
“If you miss a key piece of intelligence, you can miss an event overseas or put troops in danger,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. . “You might be missing a plot to harm the country here, nationally or elsewhere. So in this particular case, there are real-life implications.”
Section 702 allows the United States government to collect, without a warrant, the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence information. The reauthorization faced a long and bumpy road to final passage Friday after months of clashes between privacy advocates and national security hawks pushed consideration of the legislation to the brink of expiration.
Although the spying program was technically set to expire at midnight, the Biden administration had said it expected its intelligence-gathering authority to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which receives surveillance. applications
Still, officials had said the court's approval should not replace congressional authorization, particularly because communications companies could stop cooperating with the government if the program is allowed to lapse.
Hours before the law expired, U.S. officials were already scrambling after two major U.S. communications providers said they would stop complying with orders through the surveillance program, according to a person familiar with the matter, who speak anonymously to speak. private negotiations
Attorney General Merrick Garland praised the reauthorization and reiterated how “indispensable” the tool is for the Justice Department.
“This reauthorization of Section 702 gives the United States the authority to continue to collect foreign intelligence information about non-U.S. persons located outside the United States, while codifying important reforms that the Department of Justice has adopted to ensure protecting Americans' privacy and civil liberties,” Garland said in a statement Saturday.
Some lawmakers are hesitant to renew Section 702
But despite the Biden administration's pleas and classified briefings to senators this week about the crucial role they say the spy program plays in protecting national security, a group of progressive and conservative lawmakers calling for more changes they had refused to accept their version of the bill. the House sent last week.
Lawmakers had demanded that Schumer allow a vote on amendments to the legislation that would seek to address what they see as civil liberties loopholes in the bill. In the end, Schumer was able to cut a deal that would allow critics to receive votes on their amendments in exchange for speeding up the approval process.
The six amendments ultimately failed to gain the necessary support to be included in the final passage.
One of the main changes that detractors had proposed focused on restricting the FBI's access to information about Americans through the program. Although the surveillance tool only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications from Americans when they are in contact with those foreigners. Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, had been pushing a proposal that would require US officials to obtain a warrant before accessing US communications.
“If the government wants to spy on my private communications or the private communications of any American, they should be asked to get a judge's approval, just as our founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution,” Durbin said .
In the past year, US officials have revealed a series of abuses and errors by FBI analysts in improperly consulting the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the US , including a member of Congress and participants in the 2020 racial justice protests and the January 6, 2021, riots at the United States Capitol.
But members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, as well as the Justice Department, warned that requiring a warrant would severely impede officials from responding quickly to imminent national security threats.
“I believe this is a risk we cannot afford to take with the wide variety of challenges facing our nation around the world,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
