Adding Warrant Protections Would Allow Congress to Renew FISA but Cotton, Thune & Warner Prefer Sunset
Washington, D.C. — On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) objected to a deal offered by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) that would have renewed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for nine months in exchange for adding warrant requirements, and another offer for five weeks with transparency reforms. Cornyn’s objection means that the Senate won’t get unanimous consent to move forward with a FISA deal and likely won’t be able to renew the spying authority before it expires on Friday. Notably, in March, the FISA Court extended current 702 surveillance into 2027.
The following is a statement from Demand Progress Senior Policy Advisor Hajar Hammado:
“Surveillance hawks have spent all day screaming about how important it is to renew FISA but then they just objected to a good faith deal that would reauthorize Section 702 with popular, bipartisan privacy reforms. The only thing stopping FISA from being renewed is congressional leadership’s unexplained, persistent opposition to making the government get a warrant when it tries to access the private communications of Americans. Clear majorities in both parties, and of Americans in general, want a warrant requirement before renewing FISA. Why does congressional leadership prefer sunset over privacy?”
A robust set of resources on the need for privacy reforms for FISA are available here and here, and additional background, context, polling, reform demands, resources and other information is available here. A video on Pulte from Jessica Craven can be found here and a sample of the ways FISA has been used to wrongfully target protesters, journalists, politicians and others is available here. An explainer on why FISA won’t actually “go dark” on June 12 can be found here.