By Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, March 18 (Reuters) - U.S. House Republican leader Mike Johnson and the Trump administration's spy chiefs are pushing for a quick and clean renewal of the surveillance powers that allow law enforcement to mine foreign intelligence for information about Americans without judicial authorization.
How quick and clean it will be remains to be seen.
Johnson told reporters on Tuesday that past reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were "working just as we planned," arguing for a straightforward extension of the spy power. To press the point, a phalanx of intelligence officials, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Lt. Gen. William Hartman, the acting director of the National Security Agency, briefed congressional leaders behind closed doors about the program on Wednesday.
Details of the briefing were not made public. The FBI declined to comment. The CIA, the NSA, and the Justice Department didn’t return messages.
Section 702 allows the National Security Agency to surveil foreigners abroad using data drawn from U.S. digital infrastructure. But the provision has long been a magnet for anxieties over domestic surveillance from the right and the left because it can allow the NSA's law enforcement counterparts to mine the massive data trove without a warrant.
Past bids to renew the legislation have regularly produced moments of high drama, with proponents saying American spies are on the verge of going blind and opponents saying the country is sleepwalking toward a surveillance state. The 2024 effort to renew the spy power only succeeded on its fourth attempt, and a proposal to require U.S. law enforcement to get a judicial sign-off before searching the intercepted data failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote.
Some past skeptics of the law have been converted. Trump railed against the program when he was out of power, but his White House is now lobbying for its renewal. Trump loyalist Jim Jordan, who once promised to scupper it without a warrant requirement, is now among those pushing to reauthorize it without one.
But other roadblocks remain. Florida Republican Paulina Luna, for example, has said she’d vote for its renewal approval only if it’s attached to the SAVE America Act – the Republicans’ long-shot voting bill that would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Jordan’s spokesperson pointed Reuters to an interview in which he said that reforms instituted in 2024 meant that "a short term, temporary extension is fine." Luna’s representative didn't return a message.
Critics of the surveillance power say the changes made in 2024 mainly codified existing practices and did nothing to address the core issue of warrantless surveillance. They say substantive reform is all the more important given Trump’s willingness to use government power to crush his political opponents – and the gutting of federal oversight bodies that might otherwise act as a brake on intrusive surveillance.
“All of the institutional oversight mechanisms have been taken apart,” said Jake Laperruque, the deputy director of Center for Democracy and Technology’s Security and Surveillance Project. “We’ve killed all the canaries in the coal mine.”
(Reporting by Raphael Satter and AJ VicensEditing by Nick Zieminski)
