Politics
Unfortunately, betting on the triumph of constitutional rights on Capitol Hill remains a fool’s errand.
Don’t “trust any bill so large that it has to be delivered by handcart,” warns Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the top Senate opponent to a rubber stamp reauthorization of federal surveillance powers. What bureaucratic rascality could be hidden in the 3000+ pages of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act? Is this the “Biden Big Brother Better” scheme many conservatives fear?
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will expire on December 31 unless Congress reauthorizes the provision. Biden appointees and FBI chief Christopher Wray seek to stampede Capitol Hill to perpetuate the law with no real reform. But the Deep State cheerleading squad is encountering fierce opposition on the Hill.
Congress enacted Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, which authorizes the National Security Agency to surveil targets in foreign nations. The NSA vacuums up vast amounts of information as part of that surveillance and then permits the FBI to sift through its troves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation warned more than a decade ago that Section 702 “created a broad national-security exception to the Constitution that allows all Americans to be spied upon by their government while denying them any viable means of challenging that spying.” Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how Section 702 worked: “What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry…they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order…sometime, unbeknownst to you.”
Actually, the law in practice is much worse.
From the beginning, federal agencies brazenly lied about the number of Americans whose privacy was ravaged. In 2014, Former NSA employee Edward Snowden provided the Washington Post with a cache of 160,000 secret email threads that the NSA intercepted. The Post found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were American citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled wi
