Warrantless Spying Report Signals Expansion of Domestic Surveillance - The American Prospect

[justaprogressive]

Earlier this month, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a report on the most well-known aspect of the United States’ mass surveillance apparatus: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The report, which discloses surveillance actions undertaken during the last year of the Biden administration, details a marked uptick in querying of terms associated with U.S. persons, a decrease in the number of persons queried by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and most notably, an expansion of the 702 authority to include the war on drugs.

Signed into law in 2008 by George W. Bush, the 702 authority amended a 1978 law to allow mass communications collection without a warrant, as long as broad rules of engagement from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) were followed. (In reality, the FISC acts as a rubber stamp for just about every request that comes across its desk.) Even marginal attempts to reform 702 authority when its renewal comes up every few years have been met with unprecedented vitriol and leaking from intelligence officials enraged at any check on their ever-increasing powers.

Civil liberties advocates have repeatedly pointed to the fact that millions of Americans’ communications are routinely swept up in FISA surveillance, even if the marginal safeguards implemented by Congress constrain the most active FBI surveillance of U.S. persons. The intelligence agencies try to point to the first letter of FISA, “foreign,” to argue that the intention and bulk of surveillance collection is targeting non-U.S. persons and is by agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which are, at least on paper, barred from domestic surveillance.

But of course, the 702 back door allows for intercepting any communication with a targeted non-U.S. person, which includes millions of communications between non-U.S. and U.S. persons. This underscores why the new ODNI report is so important: It suggests that the authority is being broadened to include new ranges of targets.

https://prospect.org/civil-rights/2025-05-12-warrantless-spying-report-signals-expansion-of-domestic-surveillance/

[Nictuku]

1. Aren't we all communicating with 'foreigners' when we post on message boards like DU?