The White House is Wrong: Section 702 Needs Drastic Change

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With Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set to expire later this month, the White House recently released a memo objecting to the SAFE Act—legislation introduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Mike Lee that would reauthorize Section 702 with some reforms. The White House is wrong. SAFE is a bipartisan bill that may be our most realistic chance of reforming a dangerous NSA mass surveillance program that even the federal government’s privacy watchdog and the White House itself have acknowledged needs reform.

As we’ve written, the SAFE Act does not go nearly far enough in protecting us from the warrantless surveillance the government now conducts under Section 702. But, with surveillance hawks in the government pushing for a reauthorization of their favorite national security law without any meaningful reforms, the SAFE Act might be privacy and civil liberties advocates’ best hope for imposing some checks upon Section 702.

Section 702 is a serious threat to the privacy of those in the United States. It authorizes the collection of overseas communications for national security purposes, and, in a globalized world, this allows the government to collect a massive amount of Americans’ communications. As Section 702 is currently written, intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement have backdoor, warrantless access to millions of communications from people with clear constitutional rights.

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