You may have heard “Section 702” on the news this week. It's a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, and it’s expiring because Congress, true to form, couldn’t get out of its own way. Or in this case, chose not to.
The House and Senate packed up and went home today after Democrats and 19 Republicans blocked a House extension of a law that never should have existed. The Senate blocked rival partisan bills. The law expires. Credit where it's due. Those 19 Republicans did the right thing, whatever their reasons.
Doing right is not the norm in DC. Politicians love to wave little pocket Constitutions around on TV. (Cough cough. Prop.) Then they slink back to the chamber and vote for things like Section 702, which is basically the Constitution with a “just kidding” stamped on the Fourth Amendment.
This is a rare win for the good guys. For now.
We’re told it’s about foreign bad guys. That’s the sales pitch. In reality, it’s a giant government inbox stuffed with emails, texts, and calls that include Americans, and the FBI can dig through it without getting a warrant. If any private actor hoovered up people’s messages and pawed through them like that, we’d call it spying or hacking and treat it like a crime. When the government does it under Section 702, they call it intelligence.
After fifteen years, the only honest reform is a shovel and a headstone.
Here’s how the trick works.
Section 702 lets the government force U.S. tech and phone companies to hand over communications of people overseas for “foreign intelligence.” Sounds narrow. Except those people talk to Americans. And their messages run through the same Google, Apple, and AT&T that you use.
So they scoop it all up, both sides, with broad approvals from a secret court (as curious to me as large shrimp) and no individual warrants. Then the FBI sits on that pile and searches it using Americans’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses. Also without warrants.
On paper: “We don’t target Americans.” In practice: They built a system where they don’t have to. They just hoover everything up and type your name in later.
The whole reason the Fourth Amendment exists is to stop exactly that kind of “search everybody and see what turns up” nonsense. The founders despised general warrants. Our geniuses in D.C. just slapped a different label on it and called it a day.
If this were really about a handful of foreign terrorists, the numbers would be tiny. They aren’t.
In one recent year, the FBI ran around 200,000 searches using Americans’ identifiers inside 702 data. That’s more than 500 searches a day aimed at people on our side of the ocean.
Even the secret FISA Court found the FBI was fishing without cause and breaking their own rules. At 200,000 searches, that’s roughly 8,000 illegal searches in a single year.
If any police department in Louisiana racked up 8,000 illegal searches in twelve months, we’d call it a scandal. And it takes a heap of misbehavior to earn that label here. In Washington, they call it compliance issues and schedule another classified briefing.
You might picture shadowy overseas terrorists as making up the bulk of those surveilled. The released documents say otherwise.
Declassified opinions show 702 being used on 141 people who protested after George Floyd was killed. Tens of thousands of searches tied to protest groups. About 19,000 queries involving donors to a particular political candidate. A local political party. A state judge. Journalists. A sitting U.S. senator.
A coalition of 92 civil-rights groups spelled it out plainly. Section 702 enables unfettered, warrantless, and discriminatory surveillance, and it hits Black, Asian, Muslim, and immigrant communities hardest. Shocking, I know, because there is so little evidence showing a pattern of picking on them.
So the same political class that screams about weaponized government on cable TV is perfectly fine with handing the FBI a secret search engine for your messages. They’re not against weaponized government. They just want to hold the trigger.
Which means people like me are on the list too.
Just for the record, if the government comes for me and the other mouthy dissidents, I’m hoping to share a cell with Rachel Maddow or Maggie Haberman. Please, not Marjorie Taylor Greene. I don’t want to get shivved for my last slice of white bread. Plus I’d have to listen to that whole “Go Dawgs” thing and I’m forever LSU.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect you from being quietly watched and catalogued for speaking, not just from being arrested for it. Once people figure out that showing up to a march, donating to a candidate, or calling relatives overseas might drop their name into a government database, some percentage will stay home, keep their wallet shut, and keep their head down.
We know they’ve run 702 searches on Black Lives Matter protesters. Senior members of Congress have floated using it to track anti-war protesters. You can bet the No Kings and Resist movements are already in the pile. Those same members of Congress call reauthorization vital.
That’s a chilling effect. That’s not freedom. That’s self-censorship because you’ve figured out Big Brother is in the group chat.
When you point this out, defenders wave at oversight. By oversight, they mean a secret court where the government is usually the only voice in the room. Classified opinions that surface years later, blacked out like Pam Bondi’s first release of the Epstein files. Internal guidelines that agents keep violating anyway.
Most people whose messages get swept up never find out. Even when 702 data turns up in ordinary criminal cases with nothing to do with terrorism, almost nobody gets to challenge it in open court.
A right you can’t know was violated and can’t realistically challenge is not a right. It’s a fairytale.
We have done more damage to ourselves since 9/11 than the terrorists ever could have. Slowly, quietly, we came to accept what once would have been unthinkable. Giving up our rights as citizens is not patriotism. It is the opposite.
Strip out the legal jargon and ask straight questions. Is the government collecting massive amounts of private communications that include Americans, without individual warrants? Yes. Are they then searching that pile specifically for Americans, again without warrants? Yes. Have they used this on protesters, donors, journalists, and minority communities? Yes, repeatedly. Do most people affected ever get told, or get a real chance to fight it? No.
If you read that description in a story about Russia or China, you wouldn’t call it strong civil liberties with some kinks to iron out. You’d call it a surveillance state. We just have better marketing.
Slap an American flag and the word terrorism on it, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe it’s just responsible governance.
Which brings us to the question nobody in Washington wants to answer. Who actually has access to these databases? Who minds the software running the database? Palantir? DOGE? The titans of tech who’ve already bought their seats at the table? Wealthy donors of the ruling class? ICE? Whoever Trump wants to blab to at the golf course or Mar-a-Lago? We don’t know. It’s a secret.
In the age of AI, we’re not just talking about an analyst typing your name into a search bar. We’re talking about a machine that never forgets, never sleeps, and was built on everything they were never supposed to have.
Civil liberties groups and a handful of honest members of Congress have been saying the same simple things for years. If you want to search for an American in 702 data, get a warrant. If you use 702 evidence in a case, tell the defendant so a real court can review it. Stop using it as a catch-all database on protest movements and political donors.
Congress has had plenty of chances to draw that line. Every time, they walk right up to it and cave. Instead of closing the backdoor, they pass some “reform” that changes the paperwork and keeps the loophole.
Section 702 is a bipartisan project to normalize mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans under the cover of foreign intelligence. It’s been running for fifteen years. It’s been used on protesters and political opponents. And the people who built it still want to lecture us about freedom.
Letting it expire isn’t extreme. It’s the bare minimum if those words in the Bill of Rights still mean anything.
Now they want to hand the whole apparatus to Bill Pulte, a man without the qualifications to run a strawberry stand, let alone an intelligence agency. A toadie with a very clear track record of using whatever lever of power he can reach to do Trump’s bidding, exact retribution, and run bogus investigations. Look what he did with access to mortgage records. Mortgage records.
No to the renewal.
Because now we know. There will always be Pultes.
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Illustration: AI-generated. Text and photographs © Lynn McMorris.
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