The House passed a bill on Friday to reauthorize federal spying powers on foreign targets until 2026, while voting down an amendment that would have required a warrant to search Americans’ data swept up in the process.
At least 126 Republicans and 147 Democrats voted to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which Congress enacted in 2008 to expand intelligence agencies’ ability to surveil non-US persons abroad who are linked to terrorism or may pose a national security threat.
But opponents of the bill — including 88 Republicans and 59 Democrats who voted against it — argued the FBI and other agencies should need a warrant to search communications between those foreign targets and US persons in the Section 702 database.
An amendment pushing for the warrant requirement failed on the floor, and the FISA reauthorization is now expected to pass in the Democrat-controlled Senate and be signed into law by President Biden later today. It was set to expire April 19.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in a floor speech earlier this week called on the House to “get FISA done” so his chamber could “jump into action to prevent this important national security authority from lapsing.”
The White House Office of Management and Budget also issued a statement of strong support for the bipartisan bill on Thursday, while opposing the warrant amendment introduced by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
“The amendment would prohibit US officials from reviewing critical information that the Intelligence Community has already lawfully collected, with exceptions that are exceedingly narrow and unworkable in practice,” the White House said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson backed the bill, which was introduced by Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), as a necessary reform to federal spying capabilities after changes were made to an earlier version that 19 Republicans blocked on Wednesday.
Johnson (R-La.) touted 56 other reforms in the bill that would “stop the FBI’s abuses of FISA Section 702 inquiries and prevent another phony Russia Hoax investigation.”
Former President Donald Trump had tanked a procedural vote on the bill earlier this week, calling on House Republicans to “KILL FISA” in a Truth Social post.
He posted nothing about it on Friday, as the Section 702 spying authority would now expire halfway through his potential second term in the White House after Rules Committee Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) cut the five-year renewal down to two years.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner in floor debate ahead of the vote maintained that “there already is a warrant requirement” for Americans and the bill concerned incidental collection of their data.
By way of example, Turner (R-Ohio) said that if a US person sent an email to a member of the Hamas terrorist group saying, “Thank you for the bomb-making classes,” that exchange “shouldn’t take a warrant.”
Without the spying authority, the Intelligence chairman also warned that US intelligence-gathering capabilities would be shut down overnight. “We will go dark. We will go blind,” he said.
“This amendment is not about Americans’ inboxes and outboxes. This is not about Americans’ data,” he added. “This amendment is about Hezbollah’s data, Hamas’ data and the Communist Chinese Party’s data.”
Biggs accused the US intelligence community of wanting “control without any checks” on its authority by rejecting the amendment in his floor remarks — and said it was “simply inaccurate” for Turner to claim the warrant requirement would stop intelligence gathering efforts against “Hamas or any of these nefarious actors.”
“The administration cites multiple examples where using Section 702 to monitor foreign targets has provided critical intelligence, but when it comes to warrantless searches for Americans they can’t provide any examples of where they’ve provided any useful information,” Biggs added.
Biggs and House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan joined with unlikely allies for the amendment: the ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY), and Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).
Jordan (R-Ohio) drew attention to a 2021 filing in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that revealed the FBI had improperly queried US citizens’ data 278,000 times.
In doing so, the bureau admitted to wrongly surveilling both Black Lives Matter-affiliated protesters following the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and Trump supporters linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
“The FBI wasn’t even following their own rules when they did those searches,” Jordan said during debate of the bill on the House floor. “That’s why we need a warrant.”
He added that in 2021 and 2022 at least 3 million US persons had their data queried by the bureau. A Judiciary bill including the warrant amendment passed in his committee in a bipartisan 35-2 vote last December.
“If it’s an emergency situation, the FBI doesn’t have to get a warrant,” Jordan said of his committee’s bill. “We put exceptions in there.”
“Of that over 3 million searches in a two-year time span, how many of those aren’t covered by the exceptions we have in our warrant amendment?” he asked. “We can’t get an answer.”
“If they don’t fall in the exceptions and they’re searching Americans — searching your name, your phone number, your email address in this giant database — that should scare us,” he added. “And if it’s a small number, then what’s the big deal?”
The FBI put out its own white paper last month announcing that queries of US persons’ 702 information had reduced 98% following internal reforms to the process by the bureau.
Proponents of the legislation — including Turner and House Intelligence ranking member Jim Himes (D-Conn.) — have pointed out the FBI surveilled Trump’s 2016 campaign aide Carter Page under Title I, not Section 702, of FISA.
That abuse involved a bogus filing with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of the since-debunked Steele dossier — paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign — to obtain a search warrant for the Trump aide.
Johnson released a fact sheet ahead of the Friday vote on FISA outlining reforms to the court process, as well as the querying process for Section 702 data to help reign in other abuses.
Those include prohibitions on the use of press reports to obtain a FISA warrant, restrictions on the FBI’s ability to access Section 702 data for certain purposes and criminal penalties for rogue agents who abuse the spying power.
