Tag: fisa

The Trump Surveillance State

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

Rather, general warrants were based on governmental need; a meaningless standard as whatever the government wants it will tell a court it needs. The warrants authorized the bearer of the warrant to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

The stated motivation for the general warrants was the British government’s enforcement of the Stamp Act. That legislation required all colonists to have stamps affixed to all papers, books and newspapers in their possession. The enforcement of the Stamp Act was the government’s fig leaf for spying.

We know that the true reason for the Stamp Act was to conduct surreptitious searches for revolutionary materials. We know this because during the one-year existence of the Stamp Act — 1765 — a group of enterprising students at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, calculated that more revenue was spent to enforce the act than was collected by the sale of the stamps.

Historians believe that the use of general warrants for the enforcement of the Stamp Act pushed many colonists into the independence camp 10 years later in 1775. The use of general warrants also motivated James Madison and his colleagues in 1791 to craft the Fourth Amendment whose specificity requirement “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized” poignantly did away with search where you wish and seize whatever you find.

Until now.

Now, in one week on Capitol Hill, the right to privacy is facing its gravest challenges since pre-colonial days, in Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress will wrestle with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires in just days, and the court will hear a claim that general warrants are still viable.

Sec. 702 permits warrantless surveillance on Americans by permitting federal agents to use software that allows them to conduct surveillance of all fiber optic means of communication — mobile phones, message texting, emails — based on the lawful communications of some Americans to foreign persons and then their subsequent lawful communications to other Americans. The “other Americans” can include all 340 million of us.

Theoretically, the data gathered from these warrantless searches cannot be used for criminal prosecutions, since even the feds who do this spying have told members of Congress that they recognize the need for search warrants to access the content of the data. There are at least two reasons that no one should believe what the feds have said. The first is the feds lie. In 2023, they accessed the content of the data thousands of times without warrants. The second reason is that Madison and the Fourth Amendment’s ratifiers did not believe the government would restrain itself, hence the specificity requirement.

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House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.

Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.

Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.

The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.

The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.

The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.

None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.

A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.

The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Mike Johnson’s Crusade to Renew Warrantless NSA Spying on Americans Culminates This Week

House Speaker Mike Johnson is on a crusade. He is determined to pass a three-year, reform-free renewal of the notorious FISA law that authorizes the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens, on U.S. soil, without warrants of any kind.

Immediately prior to the last (unsuccessful) attempt by Johnson to pass a new reform-free renewal of this spying law — just two weeks ago — I wrote about the bizarre and deeply bipartisan history of FISA domestic spying and how the U.S. somehow became a country that authorizes its surveillance state to target American citizens, all without warrants.

I will not recount all of that here, except to note that — like the 2001 Patriot Act — the original law empowering the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants was such a self-evident departure from American tradition that passage was only possible by portraying it as a mere temporary emergency measure. Yet those spying powers have now become one of the many such “temporary” and “emergency” measures that have seamlessly become a quasi-permanent fixture of the U.S. government. This upcoming week in the House will determine whether it becomes genuinely permanent and, worse, forever immune to reforms.

The FISA bill that permits warrantless NSA spying on American citizens was first enacted by Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2008, then signed into law by President Bush. The law provided for those powers to expire four years later, unless Congress approved renewal.

The law was first renewed in 2012 with the support of the Obama White House, this time for five years, without any reforms. When that five-year renewal was set to expire in 2018, Congress, this time backed by the Trump White House, passed a six-year reform-free renewal, requiring a new vote in 2024.

For the 2018 renewal, there was a mountain of evidence demonstrating abuse, which in turn gave rise to steadfast opposition to such a renewal from dozens of members of both parties (who were demanding, among other reforms, the addition of a warrant requirement for spying on Americans). As a result, then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was forced to rely on dozens of Democratic representatives to secure FISA renewal.

Ryan accomplished this by working in close tandem with three key California Democrats: then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). That liberal trio led 65 House Democrats alongside 191 Republicans to vote to endow a President they were calling a Hitler-type fascist with virtually unlimited power to spy on Americans without warrants.

The last time the FISA bill was renewed was four years after that 2018 vote: in April, 2024, with the support of the Biden White House and the key support of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. That time, Congress was only willing to extend it only for two years, meaning the bill was scheduled to lapse on April 17, 2026, unless it was renewed again.

That is why Mike Johnson is now tasked with securing a new multi-year renewal of FISA with no reforms. On April 17 — last week — Johnson’s first attempt to renew the spying law for 18 more months failed to secure the necessary votes in the House for renewal He was thus forced to desperately plead with the chamber for a short 10-day extension to give more time to pressure the 20 House GOP holdouts to change their minds, and to try to induce more Democratic defections.

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House GOP passes short-term FISA deal amid Republican infighting

The House unanimously passed a short-term extension of the nation’s spy powers early Friday morning after GOP rebels dramatically rejected a late-night, last-minute deal to extend the measure for five years. 

Instead, the bill pushes the expiration of the powers to April 30 from April 20, while adding some additional reforms and language intended to woo the holdouts.

The move buys time for leaders to figure out how to address Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the deal crumbled, while avoiding a lapse in the authorization that expires on April 20. The Senate, which gavels back in at 10 a.m. EDT Friday morning, must still pass the stopgap and get it to President Trump’s desk by the Monday deadline.

In a 200-220 vote at about 1:15 a.m. Friday morning, 12 Republicans voted with almost all Democrats against accepting the deal, text of which was revealed just hours before the vote, after two days of meetings and delays.

Republican opposition to the amendment came not only from right-wing members who pushed for more substantial reforms and who had spent hours negotiating the package with leadership, but also from some House Intelligence Committee members who had pushed for a straight reauthorization of the program.

Soon after, a procedural vote to advance a clean, 18-month reauthorization of program racked up enough votes to fail moments later, but GOP leaders held the vote open as they hashed out a fallback option.

That procedural vote, which members of the House Freedom Caucus had long objected to, officially failed in a 197-228 vote, with 20 Republicans voting against it and four Democrats — Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Jared Golden (Maine), Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), and Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) — casting highly unusual votes to vote in favor of the rule, which is normally a test of party strength.

The House then brought up new legislation to extend the FISA authorization from April 20 to April 30, passing it by unanimous consent just after 2 a.m. and adjourning the House until Monday — canceling a day of previously-scheduled votes on Friday.

“We were very close tonight,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said walking off the floor in the wee hours of Friday morning. “There’s some nuances with the language and some questions that need to be answered, and we’ll get it done. The extension allows us the time to do that.”

“FISA is a critical national security tool. It’s also a very complicated piece of legislation, and what we’re trying to do is thread the needle of ensuring that we have this essential tool to keep Americans safe but also safeguard our constitutional rights, and making sure that the abuses of FISA in the past are no longer possible,” Johnson said.

It was a remarkable sequence of events even by the standards of the super-slim House majority that has given Republican leaders consistent headaches in advancing must-pass legislation.

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‘Unprecedented Mass Surveillance’: Bipartisan Senators Warn Of Privacy Threat Tied To FISA Renewal

Bipartisan senators are warning that a privacy threat tied to artificial intelligence (AI) could result in mass surveillance of American citizens if the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does not include sufficient guardrails.

Efforts to renew the federal surveillance law ahead of its expiration have been complicated as House GOP leaders scramble to secure enough support to pass a clean 18-month extension aligned with President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s requests, according to a Politico report. Both are pushing to reauthorize the law without changes before Monday’s deadline.

The growing power of AI is driving new worries among both Republicans and Democrats about government agencies’ warrantless purchases of Americans’ sensitive data.

Commercially available information obtained from data brokers for criminal investigations, military operations and national security circumvents constitutional restrictions on information agencies can gather from Americans, Politico reported.

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FISA Section 702 Extension Faces House Vote With No Privacy Reforms

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires in days.

The bipartisan push to extend it without a single privacy reform is now accelerating, with House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and President Trump all lining up behind an 18-month renewal that preserves the government’s ability to search Americans’ communications without a warrant.

The House Rules Committee met to consider H.R. 8035, the bill that would keep Section 702 alive through late 2027.

Johnson has refused to allow amendments, telling reporters that adding reforms would threaten the bill’s passage. That position blocks the one change that privacy-focused lawmakers in both parties have spent years fighting for: a requirement that the FBI get a judge’s approval before searching a database of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and text messages that were collected without individual court orders.

Trump posted on Truth Social today, calling on Republicans to “get a clean extension of FISA 702 through the House of Representatives this week.” He wrote, “I am asking Republicans to UNIFY and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor. We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!”

The president, who told lawmakers to “KILL FISA” during the 2024 reauthorization debate, wrote in a March Truth Social post that “whether you like FISA or not, it is extremely important to our Military.”

Grassley announced his support for the clean extension this morning after the Department of Justice agreed to revise rules governing congressional oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The DOJ committed to rolling back a Biden-era policy from November 2024 that had restricted how members of Congress could attend and observe FISC and FISCR proceedings, including banning note-taking and allowing the DOJ to exclude lawmakers from certain sessions.

Those restrictions directly contradicted the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which Congress passed in April 2024 and which explicitly required congressional access to the surveillance courts.

“I applaud DOJ for lifting its restrictions on congressional oversight of FISC and FISCR proceedings. With Congress’s access fully restored, the Trump administration has faithfully implemented the reforms Congress called for in its last FISA reauthorization and proven its commitment to transparency and the protection of civil liberties,” Grassley said.

“Section 702 is one of our nation’s most valuable national security tools. Especially given the current threat environment, it’s imperative Congress doesn’t allow this critical authority to lapse. We must ensure American lives aren’t put at risk by a potential Section 702 expiration on April 20. The best path forward is for the House to pass a clean, 18-month FISA extension.”

The DOJ agreed to stop excluding members of Congress from surveillance court proceedings, stop banning note-taking, and stop preventing lawmakers from sharing information with appropriately cleared colleagues. These were things Congress already required by law.

The DOJ was violating its own statute, got caught, and agreed to comply. Grassley is treating compliance with existing law as a reason to skip reforms that would protect 330 million Americans from warrantless searches of their private communications.

Nothing about the DOJ’s procedural fix addresses the core problem with Section 702: the FBI routinely searches a massive database of communications collected under the program to find and read Americans’ emails, texts, and phone calls, all without getting a warrant.

The FISA Court itself called the FBI’s compliance problems “persistent and widespread” in 2022. FBI queries targeting Americans’ data rose 35% in 2025, according to the latest transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The agency asking Congress for more time is the same one running more warrantless searches than ever.

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Trump Pushes Skeptical House Republicans to Pass FISA Extension: ‘It Is Extremely Important to Our Military’

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and President Donald Trump do not have a happy history, but Trump is urging congressional Republicans to extend one part of the law Trump says was not the one misused during the Russiagate hoax.

Trump made a public plea on Truth Social to extend Section 702 of FISA.

As noted by Politico, Trump followed that up by calling Republicans opposed to extending the law that allows warrantless wiretaps of non-U.S. citizens for the next 18 months to the White House.

“I am asking Republicans to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor. We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!” Trump wrote earlier in his Truth Social post.

“I was a victim of the worst and most illegal abuse of FISA in our Nation’s History, by Radical Left Lunatics, who lied to the FISA Court to spy on my 2016 Presidential Campaign in their attempt to RIG the Election in favor of Crooked Hillary Clinton. Their use of this instrument in the 2020 Presidential Election was even worse! When the Dirty Cop, James Comey, the failed Head of the FBI, went after me, he was using FISA Title I, the Domestic Collection, not FISA 702, the Foreign Collection, which needs to be extended today,” Trump continued.

“While parts of FISA were illegally and unfortunately used against me in the Democrats’ disgraceful Witch Hunt and Attack in the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA Hoax, and perhaps would be used against me in the future, I am willing to risk that as a Citizen in order to do what is right for our Country,” he wrote.

Trump said that Section 702 is a tool the military needs.

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The FISA Surveillance Tool Is Up for Renewal, and the SAVE Act Is Riding Shotgun

Congress is about to stage one of its annual spectacles: reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Normally, this is an already messy affair, but President Trump has decided to spice things up by suggesting that Republicans attach the SAVE America Act to the must-pass FISA bill.

The result is a headache for House Speaker Mike Johnson.

“Maybe you put them together, because a lot of people feel very strongly about FISA,” Trump told House Republicans at their retreat last week.

That might be the understatement of the year.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was created to let the US government collect intelligence on foreigners. In theory, it targets only non-US citizens abroad. In reality, it has become a tool for sweeping up Americans’ communications on a massive scale.

Section 702, the part now up for reauthorization, allows intelligence agencies to grab emails, texts, and calls from foreign targets and, in doing so, they routinely capture the American side of those conversations.

This incidental collection has become anything but incidental. The FBI treats Section 702 data as a domestic treasure trove, conducting millions of warrantless searches of Americans’ communications each year.

It effectively bypasses the Fourth Amendment, giving federal agencies legal cover to monitor Americans without warrants, often funneling the information into ordinary criminal investigations. FISA’s original promise of balancing security and privacy has been eroded by decades of routine overreach.

GOP leadership had been planning a clean extension, but Trump’s intervention opens the door for a faction of conservatives, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, to insist on a legislative package deal.

Luna didn’t vote to reauthorize FISA in 2024, but she and other SAVE supporters are already signaling they will use their leverage to shape the House floor debate.

Johnson likely has the votes to pass FISA with bipartisan support, but the rule vote, the procedural step determining how the floor debate proceeds, is the real landmine. Conservatives have yet to announce support, and procedural votes have long been the preferred weapon for those who want leverage without responsibility.

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Grassley, Durbin: DOJ blocking oversight of foreign intelligence courts

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ranking Member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) are urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to amend its procedures for congressional attendance at Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) proceedings ahead of the expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) next April.

The current procedures, first established by the Biden administration in November 2024, and continued under the current administration, hinder congressional oversight and conflict with Section 5(d) of the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA).

“The FISC Procedures, as drafted, comport with neither the plain language nor the spirit of RISAA, and raise numerous separation of powers concerns. As the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate’s primary committee of jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we are troubled by the Department’s lack of transparency and failure to engage meaningfully with our committee as these procedures were developed. We request that the Department amend the FISC Procedures to comply with the Constitution and RISAA,” the lawmakers wrote.

RISAA – signed into law in April 2024 – requires DOJ to allow select members of Congress and designated staff to attend and conduct oversight of FISC proceedings. In November 2024, the Biden DOJ implemented a policy that requires members of Congress and their staff to agree to a series of arbitrary and inappropriate procedures before being allowed to attend FISC proceedings, which the Trump administration has maintained.

Some of DOJ’s policies and procedures include:

  • Prohibiting members of Congress from sharing information with other members of Congress and members of their staff;
  • Restricting members of Congress from requesting information or documentation from participants of FISC proceedings;
  • Allowing DOJ staff to remove congressional observers, including members of Congress, from FISC proceedings at any time and at the sole discretion of DOJ;
  • Allowing only a limited number of congressional observers to attend FISC proceedings at any one time;
  • Prohibiting designated staff from attending the same FISC proceeding as their specified member of Congress; and
  • Prohibiting note taking during proceedings, despite congressional staff’s ability to maintain classified notebooks.

Read Grassley and Durbin’s letter to DOJ HERE or below.

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FBI Director Kash Patel EXPOSES Obama-Clinton Grand Conspiracy with Larry Kudlow — CONFIRMS Russiagate, FISA Court Abuses, and Mar-a-Lago Raid Was a Political Hit Job

FBI Director Kash Patel joined Larry Kudlow in a bombshell interview this week, and it’s ten minutes every American needs to see.

On Larry Kudlow’s show, FBI Director Kash Patel unleashed a series of bombshells that confirm what millions of Americans have long suspected: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the masterminds behind the phony Russiagate hoax and the illegal invasion of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.

Now, Patel has confirmed it on national television, Obama and Hillary Clinton were at the very top of the conspiracy.

Kudlow pressed Patel on how the FBI could justify invading the private home of a former president, something unprecedented in American history.

Patel laid it out plainly: Russiagate, the FISA Court abuses, and the Mar-a-Lago raid were all connected. A “political operation,” not a legitimate investigation.

Kudlow also asked Patel point-blank if Obama and Hillary were the architects of this grand conspiracy.

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