FISA Section 702 Renewal Faces Hurdles

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to collect intelligence from non-Americans located outside the United States without a warrant. Section 702 cannot be used to target Americans. At least some people say that Section 702 needs some reform.

When Section 702 was first enacted lawmakers knew that this could spell trouble, so the section sunsets every five years. It is up for renewal at the end of this year.

Even a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board thinks it needs reform. Travis LeBlanc said ” I do have concerns with a clean reauthorization,” he said, and he believes the program needs “common-sense protections that could be put in place to balance privacy and civil liberties with national security interest.”

The controversy comes when the U.S. spies are targeting foreigners and Americans are caught up in what they call “incidental collection”.

In a rather strange set of bedfellows, many Republicans in Congress have grown increasingly skeptical of the U.S. spies. They are sharing common fear with many privacy advocates. The combination means it is going to be very tough for a “clean reauthorization”, meaning with no changes.

There are some people who would like to reauthorize it forever instead of another five years. I think the odds of that happening is very low.

LeBlanc is not a Biden flunky; he was appointed to the PCLOB by former President Trump and heads up the cyber, data and privacy practice at the Cooley law firm.

Leblanc says:

“We also note from the transparency reports that have come out that there have been massive queries of U.S. persons” under Section 702 — 3.4 million as of 2021 in the last such report made public, LeBlanc noted. (Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported that while the FBI’s 3.4 million number was an increase from the estimated 1.9 million the previous year, the “value of those numbers is not clear for multiple reasons.” The numbers have apparently dropped since then, per a previously undisclosed report Savage cited.)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/06/surveillance-program-needs-new-protections-oversight-board-member-says/

Will Section 702 be renewed? Probably. What changes are required to satisfy critics? That is less clear. This will probably get much more vocal before the end of the year.

Credit: WaPo

by