The US Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday after congressional leaders earlier this month stripped the bill of provisions designed to protect against excessive government surveillance. The “must pass” legislation now goes to President Joe Biden for his possible signature.
The Senate’s 85-14 vote represents a major expansion of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial US surveillance program. Biden’s signature would ensure that the Trump administration opens up with new powers to compel a wide range of companies to help U.S. spies wiretap calls between Americans and foreigners abroad.
Despite concerns about unprecedented spying powers falling into the hands of controversial figures such as Kash Patel, who has vowed to investigate political enemies of Donald Trump if confirmed to lead the FBI, Democrats ultimately backed the program. Made little effort to rein in.
The Senate Intelligence Committee first approved changes to the 702 program this summer aimed at clarifying newly added language that experts said was dangerously vague. The ambiguous text was introduced into law by Congress in April, with Democrats in the Senate promising to fix the issue later this year. Ultimately, those efforts proved futile.
Legal experts began issuing warnings last winter about congressional efforts to expand FISA to cover a wide range of new businesses that are not actually subject to Section 702’s wiretap directive. Reauthorizing the program in April, Congress changed the definition of what the government considers an “electronic communications service provider,” a term that applies to companies that can be forced to install wiretaps on the government’s behalf. is
Traditionally, “electronic communications service provider” meant phone and email providers, such as AT&T and Google. But as a result of Congress redefining the term, the new limits on the government’s wiretap powers are unclear.
It is widely believed that the changes are aimed at giving the National Security Agency (NSA) US The purpose was to help target communications stored on servers at data centers. Because of the classified nature of the 702 program, however, the updated text purposely refrains from specifying which types of new businesses will be subject to government demands.
Mark Zwillinger, one of the few private attorneys to testify before the nation’s secret surveillance court, wrote in April that the changes to the 702 statute meant that “any U.S. business could have communications. [wiretapped] A homeowner’s access to office wires, or data centers where their computers reside,” thus expands the 702 program to “a variety of new contexts where there is a particularly high likelihood that the U.S. . Communications of US citizens and other individuals in the US will be ‘unknowingly’ captured by the government.
