Adam Klein is Director of the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Until June 2021, he served as Chairman of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency that oversees counterterrorism and intelligence programs.
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U.S. intelligence agencies rely on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor more than 200,000 overseas targets. But will next year be its last?
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One of the most hotly debated aspects of Section 702 is the practice of querying 702-acquired data using U.S.-person identifiers—in particular, queries conducted by the FBI in non-national-security criminal investigations. Some label these “backdoor searches,” although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has held that such queries are not searches that trigger the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.
As Bobby and others have already noted, the NSA announced Friday that it is ending “about” collection under Section 702’s upstream component.