House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) unveiled a new bill on Thursday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after two previous congressional efforts failed. The proposal largely mirrors the measure that lawmakers rejected in recent votes and would extend the surveillance authority for three years without adding a court-warrant requirement for searches of Americans’ communications collected incidentally under the program.
Section 702, set to expire April 30, allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept electronic communications of foreign nationals located overseas. Roughly 350,000 foreign targets are collected under the law, and when those targets communicate with people in the United States, the communications of Americans can be incidentally captured and become available to federal agencies.
Civil liberties advocates for nearly two decades have pushed to require a judge-approved warrant before the government can conduct targeted searches of Americans’ information obtained under Section 702. The absence of such a warrant requirement helped sink recent attempts to extend the program for 18 months and to renew it for five years.
Administration officials and past intelligence leaders argue a warrant mandate would impede investigations and threaten national security. Johnson’s plan stops short of that change. Instead, it would reauthorize Section 702 for three years, require the FBI to give monthly explanations to an oversight official when it searches Americans’ communications, impose criminal penalties for willful abuses, and enact a set of procedural modifications.
Former NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell described the bill as an attempt to strike a middle ground, saying it makes limited statutory changes while offering “gestures” toward privacy concerns and could be viewed as a reasonable compromise by national security agencies and some civil-liberties observers. Privacy advocates were less convinced. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center called the proposal “a straight reauthorization” dressed up with changes she says do not meaningfully alter how the program operates.
Democrats and some Republicans have discussed a bipartisan path to reform, but no deal has been reached. Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said leaders are negotiating an inclusive process and that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been in contact with Johnson. Himes and Rep. Jamie Raskin have been working on a separate bipartisan reform proposal. Raskin circulated a memo urging colleagues to oppose Johnson’s bill, arguing it “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
Current FBI policy requires annual FISA training and generally bars searches aimed at ordinary criminal investigations without supervisory or legal approval, though searches intended to obtain foreign intelligence are treated differently. Some conservative critics remain unconvinced as well. Former Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who helped block an earlier reauthorization, posted that “we’re not there yet,” saying the intelligence community must be held accountable for improper surveillance of Americans.
The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet Monday, the first procedural step toward bringing Johnson’s renewal bill to the House floor.