With
major NSA surveillance authorities set to expire later this month,
House Republicans are rushing to pass a bill that would not only
reauthorize existing powers, but also codify into law some practices
that critics have called unconstitutional.
The
bill takes aim at reforming how federal law enforcement can use data
collected by the National Security Agency, putting a modest
constraint on when the FBI can conduct so-called backdoor searches of
Americans’ communications. But because such searches make use of a
legal loophole, critics say the current bill may do more harm than
good by explicitly writing the practice into law.
The
bill would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which serves as the basis for some of the NSA’s
largest surveillance programs, and keep it on the books through 2023.
The law was first passed in 2008 after the George W. Bush
administration’s secret warrantless wiretapping was made public,
effectively to legalize what the administration was doing.
The
law allows the intelligence community to spy on Americans’
transnational communications without a warrant so long as the
“targets” are not Americans. In 2013, documents leaked by
whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA vacuums up a
tremendous amount of wholly domestic communications through the
program as well.
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