U.S. spy agencies regard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as one of their most valuable intelligence-collection tools, but critics say it intrudes on Americans’ privacy.
Laboring into the early hours of Saturday morning, Congress in a 60-34 vote squeaked through the renewal of a surveillance program that U.S. spy agencies regard as one of their most valuable tools and that critics on the left and the right say intrudes on Americans’ privacy.
The House approval last week came despite former president Donald Trump’s entreaty on social media to “KILL” the bill, in part due to the spurious charge that the surveillance power had been used to spy on his 2016 campaign. In a concession to win over some congressional opponents, the extension is good for only two years.
U.S. security officials for years have extolled the benefits of the law, with White House officials saying that the intelligence collected through the program accounts for more than 60 percent of the president’s daily briefing. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently disclosed that it helped the bureau discover that Chinese hackers had breached the network of a U.S.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , which provides judicial oversight of FISA, found in 2022 that the FBI had misused the authority more thanbetween 2020 and early 2021, including against donors to a congressional candidate, Jan. 6 riot suspects and people protesting the police killing of George Floyd. The FBI, the court noted, conducted such queries “without a specific factual basis to believe” they were likely to yield “foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.
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