Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are racing to save Section 702 of Fisa before it expires next Thursday, and House leaders say a new draft unveiled Thursday is meant to clear the path. The surveillance authority, created after the September 11 attacks, lets intelligence services intercept the phone calls, text messages and emails of foreign nationals.
Rick Crawford, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, argued Friday that the program should have existed before the attacks. “If we had had 702 prior to 9/11 very good likelihood and all probability would not—9/11 would not have happened,” he said in an update on the reauthorization fight.
The urgency is not abstract. Lawmakers voted earlier this month against renewing Section 702 and pushed its expiration from April 20 to April 30, buying themselves only a short reprieve. That scramble echoes earlier fights over the authority, including the short extension covered in House gives Fisa 702 a short extension as Friday deadline loomed and the later stopgap in Trump House Republicans Fisa fight ends in 10-day extension. This time, the House is trying again with a fresh draft from Speaker Mike Johnson that adds amendments aimed at privacy concerns.
The new version more clearly bars government personnel from intentionally targeting a person in the United States for surveillance under 702, expands criminal penalties for abusing the authority to include the FBI and requires audits of targeting procedures and implementation. Crawford said those changes were enough to move the bill forward, telling KATV, “We’ve been able to clean that up to satisfy, you know, both sides Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, we absolutely want to protect every American citizen’s civil liberties.”
But the bill still faces resistance from privacy advocates who say the changes do little to change how the law works in practice. The American Civil Liberties Union said the new language does not add much, if any, protection against Fourth Amendment abuses. Kia Hamadanchy, speaking for the group, said, “The thing about that language, it’s actually quite insidious because it doesn’t have to provide any new protections. All it essentially does is restate existing law.”
That split explains why Fisa 702 has been one of the most volatile surveillance fights on Capitol Hill. Supporters say it is indispensable for tracking foreign threats, while critics say the government has used it as a backdoor to sweep up Americans’ communications without a warrant. Crawford said the stakes are especially high now because of the war in Iran and unstable global geopolitics. He also said the authority played a critical role in Operation Absolute Resolve and was pivotal to the takedown of Maduro in Venezuela.
“Everything that’s taking place, not only in Iran, which has everyone’s attention, but what continues to take place as it applies to drug trafficking organizations the critical role that 702 authority played in Operation Absolute Resolve, which was the takedown of Maduro in Venezuela, 702 was pivotal to all of that. And so, what we don’t want to do is let that go dark and run the risk of another type of 9/11,” Crawford said. The bill is set to go before the House Rules Committee next Monday, and Crawford said he believes it has enough support to clear the Senate and become law before April 30.