A Politically Split Congress Can Perhaps Fuel Federal Surveillance Reforms

The National Security Agency (NSA) is urging Congress to renew its secret surveillance authorities before they expire at the end of the year. Split control of Congress provides an excellent opportunity for lawmakers to take the time to reform these laws so that American citizens have stronger protections from unwarranted snooping that’s supposed to only be used to track foreign spies and terrorists.

On Thursday, NSA Director and Army Gen. Paul Nakasone spoke at a virtual panel discussion presented by the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board to urge the renewal of “one of the U.S. government’s most important intelligence authorities.” He’s referring to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA authorizes the NSA to engage in secret surveillance to keep track of potential foreign threats, overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is supposed to make sure that Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless snooping are honored.

Or that’s the ideal, anyway. In reality, particularly in the wake of 9/11, the NSA has repeatedly been caught secretly collecting and tracking far more domestic data than Americans had been told. Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT ACT, passed in 2001, also fueled the secret collection of Americans’ online communications and phone records. The extent of the surveillance was partly exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013, and since then there’s been significant political debate over and some modest reforms of these authorities to better protect Americans’ data privacy.

We also can’t talk about federal surveillance authorities anymore without talking about the federal investigation surrounding President Donald Trump over whether he or his aides had been compromised by Russian interests on the campaign trail leading up to the 2016 election. We’ve subsequently learned that the FBI had submitted misleading warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to get authorization to wiretap forme