Latest in FISA Reform
The Senate voted 65 to 34 to extend FISA Section 702 authorities for six years on Thursday, one day before the temporary authorization was set to expire. The House passed the reauthorization measure on Jan. 11, and it will now head to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.
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.
President Trump tweeted lies against his own intelligence community in the course of signaling opposition to a legislative priority of his own administration on a crucial national security priority at an especially delicate moment in time.
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.
On Dec. 21, the House and Senate voted 238-188 and 66-32, respectively, to pass a concurring resolution extending government funding until Jan. 19, 2018. One provision of that bill extended the FISA Amendments Act Section 702 reauthorization deadline to that date. Section 702 was previously set to sunset on Dec. 31, 2017. The relevant provision is included below. (Note: The date specified in Section 106(3) is Jan. 19.)
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:
On Nov. 8, the House Judiciary Committee passed, 27-8, a revised version of the USA Liberty Act of 2017 with several amendments. Below is a summary of the bill the committee passed, including key changes.