[ Flash ] Mass Surveillance in the U.S. Takes a Hit
The five-year extension of the FISA provisions enabling warrantless surveillance of any American has just been killed by Congress.
Thomas Massie is something else. The Republican congressman from Kentucky who forced by law the publication of the Epstein files against an administration that had promised it — then quietly buried it — has struck again. This time, alongside allies Tim Burchett and Lauren Boebert, he torpedoed the Trump administration’s push to extend Section 702 of FISA for another five years. The same provision that allows intelligence agencies to surveil any American without a warrant. The same provision Trump swore during his campaign to abolish. The House was recalled at midnight for a snap vote — a tactic that backfired spectacularly.
The extension was blocked. The administration bought itself two weeks, not five years.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978 in the wake of documented abuses by the FBI and CIA throughout the 1960s and ‘70s — exposed by the Church Committee. It established a legal framework for intelligence-related surveillance, including a secret federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to authorize (or reject) agency requests. It was gutted by the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and again by the infamous Section 702 amendment in 2008, which opened the door to warrantless collection of communications and metadata.
Edward Snowden blew the lid off the whole operation in 2013, releasing thousands of classified documents proving the NSA was using FISA as cover for mass surveillance that was both illegal and unconstitutional.
Two weeks to draft, debate, and pass a reformed law? Good luck.
The irony here is almost too rich to be satirical: FISA Section 702 is the very instrument the Obama administration wielded against Trump’s own campaign team in 2016. It was the cornerstone of Russiagate — that sprawling operation to brand him a Kremlin asset, which poisoned his entire first term. Trump promised to kill it. Then he demanded to extend it. Draw your own conclusions about the man’s memory, principles, or care for the Americans who elected him.
It is worth noting what Section 702’s expiration also means in practice: the NSA no longer holds the authority to compel any American tech or telecom company to hand over the communications, emails, and metadata of foreign nationals outside the United States. That is not a footnote. That is a seismic shift.
Meanwhile, the European Union continues maneuvering toward generalized mass surveillance through the back door — cloaked in the language of child protection — in direct violation of EU treaties and binding rulings from the EU Court of Justice. We covered that this morning.
A pointed observation for the independent media landscape: instead of perpetually shrieking about censorship as the existential threat to democracy, perhaps it is time to grasp what is actually at stake. What is freedom of expression worth in the absence of privacy? The fundamental distinction between Europe and the United States is precisely this: in Europe, privacy retains genuine legal protection, and you cannot simply hoover up communications, metadata, and personal data at will.
Those who, instead of reasoing, manufacture hysteria over the unenforceable DSA, Chat Control, digital identity, and the European Commission’s laughable digital pass are, whatever their intentions, doing the establishment’s work for it.