Latest in Section 702
On Aug. 10, the Director of National Intelligence released its 21st Joint Assessment of Section 702 Compliance, which covers June 1, 2018 to Nov. 30, 2018. The semiannual report is produced in compliance with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released partially redacted documents related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s (FISC) authorization of the 2018 certifications under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FISC initially approved most parts of the certification, but ruled that other aspects of the FBI protocols concerning information regarding U.S. persons were inadequate.
The legislative debate over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has ended with passage of a six-year reauthorization that omitted many of the provisions privacy advocates had argued were necessary. But the legal and policy debate is likely to continue in the U.S. and in European courts.
We took different positions in the overall debate on Section 702. But we agree that there is an important step the U.S. government can take now to bolster transparency and accountability within the program without unduly burdening legitimate intelligence activities.
The Senate voted by a razor-thin margin Tuesday to invoke cloture on the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, which would reauthorize for six years Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bill includes some significant changes to 702, though the reforms are substantially more modest than those sought by privacy advocates.
Last month, Congress extended the Dec. 31 deadline to reauthorize Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act until Jan. 19. With 10 days to go and an expected flurry of legislative activity before a final bill passes and is signed, Lawfare will be collating relevant documents, including draft bills and amendments, on this resource page.
Lawfare carried comprehensive coverage of this year’s developments in the lead up to the Dec. 31, 2017 reauthorization deadline for Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (along with the other provisions of the law’s Title VII). The government bought itself a few more weeks in last week’s continuing resolution to extend government spending, when Congress and the White House pushed the deadline for reauthorization forward to Jan. 19 of next year.
As the year is coming to a close, Congress has now missed the deadline for reauthorizing FISA Section 702. Molly Reynolds, a Brookings fellow in Governance Studies and expert on Congress, joined Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey for a converation on the failure to reauthorize and what happens next. They discussed the politics of Section 702, the influence of this year's overall legislative agenda, and what to expect in 2018 for the crucial intelligence apparatus.
In less than a month, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is set to expire. As the clock runs out on one of the U.S. government’s most important counterterrorism and counterintelligence tools, public discussion of the program and possible legislative changes remain mired in misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and political sound bites.
The effort to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) may turn on a partisan fight over the “unmasking” rules that govern the disclosure of U.S. person identities in intelligence reports. Both the House intelligence and judiciary committees have proposed to write those rules into law for the first time. Speaking for many House Democrats, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) decried the changes as “all in service of the utter B.S.
The House Permament Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has released its version of the FISA Amendements Reauthorization Act of 2017.
You can find the document here: