WASHINGTON — Hours before it was set to expire, a sprawling digital surveillance net — a program wielded over the American public by the U.S. government — got a brief extension from Congress.
The Senate rejected a bill passed by the House on Wednesday evening, 235-191, to reauthorize the initiative for three years, with minor reforms folded in. Those changes excluded a requirement that the government obtain a warrant before accessing Americans’ private data.
Some supporters of the extension cite President Donald Trump’s war with Iran — which has not been authorized by Congress — as a reason to maintain the digital surveillance. Foes say the program enables domestic spying and is a threat to civil rights.
“People deeply care,” Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-11th) said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “I’m shocked that the Republicans who seem to care about the right to privacy, or at least their own, that they would be so reckless with allowing for this warrantless data capture.”
On Thursday, the Senate instead passed by voice vote a 45-day extension without any changes under current law. After the Senate dispatched the bill, the House voted, 261-111, on the reprieve. That cleared the measure for Trump’s signature hours before the program was set to lapse at day’s end and put off serious debate on program reforms.
Earlier in April, Congress passed a 10-day extension into law to keep the surveillance operational.
Section 702
Congress in 2008 established the program, formally Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enabling the U.S. government to conduct electronic surveillance of foreign nationals. While the program is directed at foreigners, U.S. citizens are often swept up in its so-called “backdoor” searches.
Congress most recently authorized the initiative in 2024, during the Biden administration. Lawmakers voted to expand the 702 program by allowing intelligence officials to tap into Americans’ data through internet connections, such as Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or in a commercial building.
“We need to come to a time where there is some sort of a warrant or system that’s better,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd) said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News last week.
“I will do what we need to do because we are at a time of unrest. We are at a time of war,” Van Drew said. In the U.S., “no doubt we have some sleeper cells, and we have some people who are capable of great violence.”
Van Drew and fellow Republican congressman Chris Smith (R-4th) voted for the legislation Wednesday and the 45-day extension on Thursday, a reversal from how they voted when Congress authorized the program during the Biden term.
Smith said he, too, was open to reforms. “While not completely perfect, FISA’s law enforcement and national security tools are particularly critical at a time when threats from adversaries are widespread and growing,” Smith said in statement to NJ Spotlight News. “We don’t want warrantless FBI probes. What we’re doing is working to get a better FISA.”
Protesters, senator, judge
Court records declassified in 2023 show the program is often abused. In 2020 the FBI, for instance, conducted improper digital searches against protestors, a U.S. senator and a state court judge who had brought allegations of civil-rights abuses to the FBI.
A recent review found the FBI violated search rules of the program more than 278,000 times.
Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy and free-speech advocacy group, said Congress must reauthorize Section 702 “every few years.”
“These reauthorizations give us a chance to tinker with the language of the law and introduce some much-needed reforms,” Guariglia said in a statement. “We need to make sure that when an FBI agent wants to look through Americans’ conversations scooped up as part of a national security intelligence program, they need a warrant signed by a judge just as if they were trying to search your email account or your house.”
New Jersey’s House members in 2024 fractured on a separate bill to prevent government agencies from buying dossiers of information on citizens from third-party data brokers.
That measure never got a Senate vote in the last Congress.
Opposition in the Senate, led by libertarian-minded Republicans and privacy advocates, like Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, stonewalled passage of the House legislation.
Wyden and other critics telegraphed their opposition early this week.
“The Trump administration has also been abusing its authorities to go after journalists whose stories they don’t like,” Wyden, a longtime privacy hawk, said during Senate debate on Tuesday. “All it takes is an accusation of a foreign connection and they can be subjected to 702 searches.”
‘We’re at war’
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-5th), who sits on the House intelligence committee, said he takes “privacy concerns seriously.” The program, though, is too valuable to lapse, he said in a statement.
“Section 702 is how we collect intelligence on our enemies around the world,” Gottheimer said. “It is the life-saving tool that stops foreign threats before they reach American soil and ensures we have the intelligence we need to detect plots against us before it’s too late.”
Rep. Herb Conaway (D-3rd), a first-term member who voted for the House-passed bill but missed the vote on the short-term measure, said national security concerns won out in this moment.
“We’re at war. We have important enemies overseas that are trying to hack into everything from our elections to our national defense infrastructure and everything else,” Conaway said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “FISA, for all its faults — and it does have faults — I think right now to forgo its use is a mistake.”
