For Immediate Release
April 12, 2024
Contact: Julian Brookes, brookesj@brenann.law.nyu.edu, 646–673–6224
Today the U.S. House of Representatives voted 273–147 to pass a bill reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for a period of two years and expanding the government’s surveillance powers. Lawmakers rejected a proposal that would have required the federal government to obtain a warrant before using Section 702 to conduct surveillance of Americans’ communications.
Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, had the following reaction:
“Members of the House voted to reward the government’s widespread abuses of Section 702 by massively expanding its surveillance powers. This is a craven betrayal of the Americans who placed their faith in these members to protect their rights.
“If Congress passes this bill, we will enter into an unprecedented era of government surveillance that dwarfs anything we saw during the era of COINTELPRO.”
Background
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance allows the federal government to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign intelligence targets overseas, but this surveillance also sweeps in large volumes of Americans’ communications, including their phone calls and text messages. Federal agencies routinely get around the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless domestic surveillance by searching Americans’ data acquired under Section 702 – a process known as a “backdoor search” – and by purchasing Americans’ personal information from third-party companies known as “data brokers.”
This press release is available online here.
Brennan Center Resources
- “Closing the Data Broker Loophole” (Emile Ayoub and Elizabeth Goitein, February 2024)
- “Protecting Americans from Warrantless Surveillance” (Elizabeth Goitein, December 2023)
- “How to Fix U.S. Surveillance Law,” (Elizabeth Goitein, July 2023)
