A bipartisan group of US lawmakers introduced a bill to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Tuesday, touting new provisions they claim address longstanding concerns.
“Americans understand that it's possible to confront our countries' adversaries ferociously without throwing our constitutional rights into the garbage can,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the bill’s co-sponsors, at a news conference.
“Our Founding Fathers made it clear that if government agencies want to read an American's private communications, they should get a warrant.”
Section 702 was a provision of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act first enacted in 2008 to ostensibly enhance counterterrorism operations. The legislation codified the collection of electronic data from around the globe by US intelligence agencies.
Wyden’s bill places warrant requirements on searches of US citizens’ data and introduces other protections. In the absence of a warrant, searches of 702 data would need to be justified by a risk of death or serious physical harm or a legal granting of consent.
The bill would also require intelligence agencies to receive approval from the US attorney general for searches of data from or about a US citizen. Such searches would be permitted in cases related to drug trafficking, terrorism, cyberattacks, and attacks on infrastructure or government officials.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation, a US-based civil libertarian group, supported the legislation in a statement released Tuesday while advocating for additional protections to be passed.
“While Section 702 was first sold as a tool necessary to stop foreign terrorists, it has since become clear that the government uses the communications it collects under this law as a domestic intelligence source,” the group said in a statement.
“Because we live in an increasingly globalized world, the government retains a massive trove of communications between people overseas on US persons.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for US President Joe Biden criticized the bill, though they confessed they haven’t yet read its full text. The senior official claimed the legislation is “both the wrong fit for what we're doing and operationally unworkable.”