By Gaby Del Valle , a policy reporter. Her past work has focused on immigration politics, border surveillance technologies, and the rise of the New

Controversial US surveillance program (briefly?) lapses amid congressional dysfunction

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2024-04-20 15:00:06

By Gaby Del Valle , a policy reporter. Her past work has focused on immigration politics, border surveillance technologies, and the rise of the New Right.

The Senate has passed a bill reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial program that allows warrantless spying on foreign “targets,” but a long, knock-down, drag-out fight over amendments kept the Senate in session past midnight on Friday, when the surveillance program officially expired.

To be clear, the spying wasn’t actually going to stop. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-OH) pointed out on the Senate floor on Friday afternoon, the FISA court recently granted a government request to allow the program to continue until April 2025.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) claimed that the FISA court’s extension of Section 702 certification “doesn’t mean the program can continue uninterrupted for another year.”

“In the event of a lapse,” Cornyn continued, “tonight at midnight, some communication service providers will stop cooperating with the United States government. That’s exactly what happened in 2008 when the predecessor of 702, called the Protect America Act, lapsed.”