Warnings Mount in Congress Over Expanded US Wiretap Powers
Experts tell US lawmakers that a crucial spy program’s safeguards are failing, allowing intel agencies deeper, unconstrained access to Americans’ data.
Privacy and surveillance experts and United States lawmakers from both parties on Thursday warned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s continued access to Americans’ communications without a warrant under a controversial surveillance law risks turning a foreign intelligence tool into a standing engine for domestic spying.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, four witnesses—a former US attorney, a conservative litigator, a civil liberties advocate, and a tech-policy analyst—urged Congress to impose a probable-cause warrant requirement on searches of a vast government database built under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—or allow the authority to expire when it comes up again for reauthorization this spring.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance
Related Knowledge Center: State surveillance
While government monitoring of personal digital communications has traditionally been associated with authoritarian regimes such as China, the Trump regime has moved to use citizens’ personal information in unprecedented ways.
Digital privacy and data security | FISA — Section 702