We’re living in a surveillance and police state whether or not Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act is extended past April 19, 2024. From Patrick Eddington at antiwar.com:
Before leaving town for the 2023 end-of-year holidays, Congress managed to avoid a 12:01am January 1, 2024 expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
It began life in a totally unregulated form as a component of President George W. Bush’s unconstitutional STELLAR WIND electronic mass surveillance program. After the New York Times exposed STELLAR WIND in December 2005, Congress spent more than two years trying to make the illegal program, well, legal. The result was the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, of which Section 702 is the key component.
Simply stated, FISA Section 702 allows the federal government to intercept communications passing through the global telecommunications infrastructure. While the program is ostensibly designed not to deliberately target Americans, in actual practice the text messages, emails, phone calls, and other digital data created or transmitted by Americans are routinely swept up in this electronic dragnet.
In prior years, it meant that millions of Americans had their digital communications captured, stored, and searched as a result of FISA Section 702 collection. On December 5, FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed to the Senate Judiciary Committee that all of that has changed, but most Senators weren’t buying it, especially Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).
Because of the ongoing controversy over Section 702, many wonder whether it will be renewed at all, or in significantly modified form. The battle between the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees over the issue resulted in competing bills, neither of which made it to the House floor after Speaker Johnson pulled both off the House calendar.
