Spying On Citizens Never So Easy

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) reads like a dark satire of today's U.S. government.

As reported by CNN:

President Joe Biden on Saturday signed a bill that reauthorizes a key surveillance authority after the Senate passed the legislation late Friday night, avoiding a lapse in the controversial program.

Lawmakers voted 60-34 for the bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after the House passed the measure late last week.

The reauthorization flouts the ACLU’s call on Congress last year “to significantly reform the law or allow it to sunset.”

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. government engages in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ and foreigners’ phone calls, text messages, emails, and other electronic communications. Information collected under the law without a warrant can be used to prosecute and imprison people, even for crimes that have nothing to do with national security. Given our nation’s history of abusing its surveillance authorities, and the secrecy surrounding the program, we should be concerned that Section 702 is and will be used to disproportionately target disfavored groups, whether minority communities, political activists, or even journalists.

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of 2023. We call on Congress to significantly reform the law, or allow it to sunset.

Even CNN acknowledges the following:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans’ information is incidentally collected during that process and then accessed each year without a warrant — down from millions of such queries the US government ran in past years. Critics refer to these queries as “backdoor” searches.

As the quaint late 18th century philosopher, James Madison, remarked at the Constitutional Convention: “The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”