House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday laid out his case for why Congress needs to embrace a short and clean reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Authority (FISA), a key surveillance authority.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and House Republican leadership are advancing an 18-month extension of Section 702 next week, which would give the Senate enough time to also pass the legislation to reauthorize the spy authority before its April 20 deadline. The Trump administration supports a clean extension of the surveillance authority.
Section 702 is a surveillance authority meant to be used to spy on foreign adversaries; however, Americans’ private communications incidentally get surveilled without a warrant, contrary to the Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless surveillance.
Many conservatives still wish to provide additional privacy guardrails to Section 702, including requiring a warrant to obtain Americans’ private communications, barring law enforcement from purchasing American’s private data through data brokers, and fixing the overly broad definition of electronic communications service provider.
Jordan told Breitbart News that with the advance of the last FISA bill, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) contained dozens of reforms that had protocols, audits, and accountability that would seek to better protect Americans’ civil liberties.
“We’ve seen a huge change from just a few years ago. There were 278,000 times where a query was done, a search was done, that didn’t follow the protocols that the FBI had for itself well last year. Based on all the reforms we did in that legislation, the most recent report we received, it went down 270,000 to 127, most of those mistakes were just typos and procedural mistakes. There weren’t any substance mistakes,” Jordan explained.
He continued, “We’ve made real changes. We went from 10,000 agents who could initially query in search the database, down to it’s just a few 100 who have the capability and the authority now to do that. We feel like, in light of all those changes, a short term, temporary extension is fine. And that’s what the White House is asking for. We think that makes sense in light of all the progress we’ve seen.”
The Judiciary chairman said he continues to work with Intelligence Committee Rick Crawford (R-AR) on issues such as electronic communications service providers and a potential warrant requirement for searching American communications.
“While we’re still working on some things that we think can be helpful in the future, we had no problem with temporary extension,” he added.
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