In 2008, Congress passed a set of updates to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including Section 702 which authorized warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the country. However, documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that 702 was being used far more heavily than many expected, serving as the legal basis for the collection of large quantities of telephone and Internet traffic passing through the United States (and unlike 215, including content rather than just metadata). Still, as 702 only permits overseas collection, most criticism of the provision has come from abroad. But many domestic privacy advocates also worry that large amounts of American communication are being swept up “incidentally” and then used as well.
Latest in FISA: 702 Collection
Section 702 reform need not infringe on the essential foreign intelligence needs of the intelligence community.
In light of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats’s argument that quantifying the collection of U.S. person communications under Section 702 would exhaust agency resources and threaten privacy rights, here are four questions that Senator Wyden should ask now to establish why an estimate has not been provided and what could be done to encourage such an estimate in the future.
Pursuant to a FOIA request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FISA Court has released 18 redacted opinions, each regarding FISA Section 702. The opinions are listed below.
Follow along as we liveblog this morning's Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on FISA Section 702, featuring testimony from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein; Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe; Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats; and National Security Agency Director Adm. Mike Rogers.
Earlier today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) introduced legislation to make permanent Section 702 and the other components of Title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, along with a group of Republican Senators.
Senator Cotton's press release on the bill is available here and below. Lawfare will publish the draft legislation once it becomes available.
A summary of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit's ruling in Wikimedia v. NSA.
A summary of the trove of documents related to FISA targeting and minimization procedures released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including a lengthy April 26, 2017 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) memorandum order and opinion approving the new and amended targeting and minimization procedures.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released several sets of documents relating to FISA Section 702. The documents are too numerous to embed in this post, but are linked below by category.
A summary of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's annual transparency report regarding the use of national security authorities.
According to today’s IC transparency report for calendar year 2016, only one FBI query in a non-national-security investigation returned 702-acquired data about a U.S. person in 2016.