House Speaker Mike Johnson has been pressuring two committees to stop butting heads and quickly meld their competing bills to rewrite the government’s most powerful spy power, The Washington Times has learned.
The speaker is forcing the rival Republican factions — the federal weaponization watchdogs on the Judiciary Committee and the national security hawks on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — to get on the same page before an April deadline. Members of both committees are now at the negotiating table to try to hash out a makeover of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, gave the committees until the start of April to settle on a single bill to overhaul the spy law, strengthening his position to negotiate with President Biden and Senate Democrats.
A top issue is FISA’s Section 702, which grants the government broad powers to scoop up mass quantities of electronic communications to snoop for evidence of foreign plots and dangers. Americans aren’t supposed to be targeted but can have communications snared and even searched without a warrant.
Most lawmakers, citing a history of abuses, say the authority needs reforms, but the question of whether it needs tweaks or a total overhaul has resulted in an intense dispute.
Section 702 will sunset on April 19 unless Congress renews it.
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The committees have been meeting since last week to merge key elements of their respective bills, said lawmakers involved in the talks.
Finding a middle ground is tricky.
Rep. Michael Waltz, Florida Republican and an intelligence committee member, said Americans must be assured of broad protections.
“We have to preserve the capability to go after the bad guys, particularly now with the world on fire. At the same time, we have to protect Americans’ rights,” he told The Washington Times. “How we message that is incredibly important.”
The Judiciary Committee has proposed a more aggressive overhaul. It pushes the government to show probable cause to obtain a warrant before searching data to identify Americans.
The intelligence committee bill would raise the bar for using information to justify a search on an American and curb the small number of cases in which the FBI is looking specifically for evidence of a crime. The FBI would still have the power to use evidence uncovered in more general national security threat searches.
“There’s a lot of agreement on a lot of things, but the key issue we care about is we’ve got to have the warrant requirement,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, told The Times.
He insisted that the final bill include the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which bars the government from buying Americans’ data that would otherwise require a warrant.
Both committees’ bills codify changes the government has made unilaterally over the years as abuses are reported.
The secret FISA court that oversees the data collection revealed last year that Section 702 was used to run queries on racial justice protesters in 2020, donors to a political campaign, and people suspected of involvement in the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
The FISA court said the FBI had a “pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries.”
Supporters of the Judiciary Committee bill say those findings show the intelligence community can’t police itself and needs strong guardrails to protect Americans’ constitutional rights.
Supporters of the intelligence committee legislation say a warrant requirement and other restrictions would undermine the value of the program, which the national security community says is the backbone of U.S. efforts to constrain China, stop fentanyl smuggling cartels and sniff out terrorist attacks.
Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican on the Judiciary Committee, backs the intelligence committee bill.
“To put it simply, losing Section 702 would be a calamity for American security and a disaster for those who care about sensible and needed reforms to this process,” he wrote in an op-ed this week in The Times.
Mr. Johnson intended to put both bills on the House floor last month and let lawmakers’ votes decide which one moved forward, but he canceled the votes because of mounting rancor between the two factions.
Intelligence officials, insisting they have policed themselves and fixed problems as they arose, have pleaded with Congress to keep the program intact. They argue that the Section 702 material is invaluable and dominates the president’s daily national security briefing.
Privacy abuses have repeatedly surfaced.
Last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of U.S. citizens’ FISA-collected data in 2021. That number plunged to 204,000 the subsequent year after the internal changes.
Government snooping has been a touchy topic since the USA Patriot Act was enacted. It intensified a decade ago after Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, revealed the extent of the government’s bulk data collection.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and outspoken critic of government snooping, revealed last week that the NSA has secretly been buying Americans’ internet records and using them for spying purposes without a warrant.
He called the practice a “legal gray area,” with data brokers quietly obtaining and reselling the internet “metadata” without the users’ consent. He said the NSA has been trying to keep everything under wraps.
According to documents obtained by the House Judiciary select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, the federal government flags terms such as “MAGA” and “Trump” for financial institutions if Americans use those phrases when completing transactions.
Republican lawmakers on the panel said shoppers at retailers such as Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods and those who have purchased religious texts such as the Bible may also have had their transactions flagged.
• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
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