Congress again failed to limit the scope of spying powers in the new defense bill

The US Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday after congressional leaders earlier this month stripped the bill of provisions designed to protect against excessive government surveillance. The “must-pass” legislation now heads to President Joe Biden for his expected signature.

The 85-14 Senate vote strengthens a major expansion of the controversial US surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Biden’s signature will ensure that the Trump administration begins with newfound authority to force a wide range of companies to help U.S. spies eavesdrop on phone calls between Americans and foreigners abroad.

Despite concerns about unprecedented spying powers falling into the hands of controversial figures like Kash Patel, who has pledged to investigate Donald Trump’s political enemies if confirmed to lead the FBI, Democrats ultimately made little effort to rein in the program.

The Senate Intelligence Committee first approved changes to the 702 program this summer with an amendment intended to clarify newly added language that experts called dangerously vague. The vague text was introduced into law by Congress in April, and Senate Democrats have promised to correct the problem later this year. Ultimately, these efforts proved unsuccessful.

Legal experts began issuing warnings last winter about Congress’ efforts to expand FISA to cover a wide range of new companies not already subject to Section 702’s wiretap directives. While reauthorizing the program in April, Congress changed the definition of What the government considers to be an “electronic communications service provider,” the term applied to companies that can be forced to conduct wiretaps on behalf of the government.

Traditionally, the term “electronic communications service providers” refers to phone and email service providers, such as AT&T and Google. But as a result of Congress’s redefinition of the term, the new limits of government wiretapping powers have become blurred.

It is widely assumed that the changes were intended to help the National Security Agency (NSA) target communications stored on servers in US data centers. Given the secretive nature of the 702 Program, the updated text deliberately avoids specifying the types of new companies that would be subject to government demands.

Mark Zwillinger, one of the few private lawyers to testify before the nation’s secret surveillance court, wrote in April that changes to Section 702 mean that “any American company could have its communications (eavesdropped) by a property owner who has access to office wires, or data centers where their computers are located,” thus expanding the 702 program “to a variety of new contexts where there is a particularly high probability that the communications of American citizens and other persons in the United States will be captured.” The government “inadvertently.”