FISA: Congress Fails To Stop Spy Agencies From Abusive Spying On Americans

By Michael Waldman\Brennan Center Photos: YouTube This past week, quickly and with little public awareness, Congress markedly expanded government’s power to snoop on its citizens. At a time of worry about privacy, government overreach, and “the Deep State,” this was action, motivated by expediency, that ignored public concerns. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect the private communications of non-Americans located outside the United States without a warrant. The law aimed to make it easier for intelligence agencies to spy on foreign terrorists. But the communications of Americans who call, email, and text people outside the country are sometimes collected too — even though the government would normally need a warrant to access them. Despite a congressional directive to “minimize” retention and use of that information, agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA have crafted court-approved rules that let them search Section 702 databases for the communications records of Americans. These agencies perform more than 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications every year. By itself, that is an appalling violation of Americans’ privacy rights. But the problem is compounded by “persistent and widespread” abuses of this authority, including baseless searches...