Don’t Fall for the Intelligence Community’s Monster of the Week Justifications

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In the beloved episodic television shows of yesteryear, the antagonists were often “monsters of the week”: villains who would show up for one episode and get vanquished by the heroes just in time for them to fight the new monster in the following episode. Keeping up with the Intelligence Community and law enforcement’s justifications for invasive, secretive, and uncontrollable surveillance powers and authorities is a bit like watching  one of these shows. This week, they could say they need it to fight drugs or other cross-border contraband. Next week, they might need it to fight international polluters or revert to the tried-and-true national security justifications. The fight over the December 31, 2023 expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is no exception to the Monster of the Week phenomenon.

Section 702 is a surveillance authority that allows the National Security Agency to collect communications from all over the world. Although the authority supposedly prohibits targeting people on U.S. soil, people in the United States communicate with people overseas all the time and routinely have their communications collected and stored under this program. This results in a huge pool of “incidentally” collected communications from Americans which the Federal Bureau of Investigation eagerly exploits by searching through without a warrant. These unconstitutional “backdoor” searches have happened millions of times and have continued despite a number of attempts by courts and Congress to rein in the illegal practice.

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TELL congress: End 702 Absent serious reforms

Now, Section 702 is set to expire at the end of Dec

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