House Speaker Mike Johnson has been pressuring the Intelligence and Judiciary committees to stop butting heads and quickly meld their competing bills to rewrite the government’s most powerful spy power, the Washington Times has learned.
The speaker is forcing the rival GOP factions — Judiciary’s federal weaponization watchdogs and Intel’s national security hawks — to get on the same page before an April deadline. Members of both committees are now at the negotiating table and trying to hash out the makeover of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, gave the committees until the start of April to settle on a single bill to overhaul the spy law, which would strengthen his position to negotiate with President Biden and Senate Democrats.
A top issue is FISA’s Section 702, which grants the government broad powers to scoop up mass quantities of electronic communications to snoop through for evidence of foreign plots and dangers. Americans aren’t supposed to be targeted, but can have communications snared — and even searched — without a warrant.
A history of abuses has left most lawmakers saying the authority needs reforms, but there’s an intense dispute over whether it needs tweaks or a total overhaul.
Section 702 will sunset on April 19 unless Congress renews it.
The committees have been meeting since last week to merge key elements of their respective bills, said lawmakers involved in the talks.
The trick will be to find a middle ground.
Rep. Mike Waltz, Florida Republican and member of the Intelligence Committee, said they need to assure Americans that they are protected in every sense of the word.
“We have to preserve the capability to go after the bad guys, particularly now with the world on fire. At the same time, we have to protect Americans’ rights,” he told The Washington Times. “How we message that is incredibly important.”
The Judiciary Committee bill is a more aggressive overhaul, pushing the government to show probable cause to obtain a warrant before searching data to identify Americans.
The Intelligence Committee bill would heighten the bar for what information can be used to justify a search on a U.S. person and would curb the small number of cases where the FBI is looking specifically for evidence of a crime. It would still allow the FBI to use evidence uncovered in more general national security threat searches.
“There’s a lot of agreement on a lot of things, but the key issue we care about is we got to have the warrant requirement,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told The Times.
He also insisted the final bill include the Fourth Amendment Not For Sale Act, which bars the feds from buying Americans’ data that would otherwise require a warrant.
Both committees’ bills codify some changes the government has made unilaterally over the years as abuses were reported.
The secret FISA court that oversees the data collection revealed last year that Section 702 was used to run queries on racial justice protesters in 2020, donors to a political campaign, and persons suspected of involvement in the Capitol riot in 2021.
The FISA court said the FBI had a “pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries.”
Backers of the Judiciary Committee bill say those findings show the intelligence community can’t police itself and needs strong guardrails to protect Americans’ constitutional rights.
Supporters of the intelligence committee legislation say requiring a warrant and other new restrictions would undermine the value of the program, which the national security community says is the backbone of U.S. efforts to constrain China, stop fentanyl smuggling cartels and sniff out terrorist attacks.
Rep. Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican on the Judiciary Committee, backs the Intelligence Committee bill.
“To put it simply, losing Section 702 would be a calamity for American security and a disaster for those who care about sensible and needed reforms to this process,” he wrote in an op-ed this week in The Times.
Mr. Johnson last month was going to put both bills on the House floor and let lawmakers’ votes decide which one moved forward. But he canceled the votes amid mounting rancor between the two factions.
Intelligence officials have pleaded with Congress to keep the program intact, saying they have policed themselves and fixed problems when they arose. They argued that the Section 702 material is invaluable and dominates the president’s daily national security briefing.
But privacy abuses repeatedly surface.
Last year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed that the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of U.S. citizens’ FISA-collected data in 2021. That number plunged to 204,000 the following year after the internal changes.
Government snooping has been a touchy topic since the USA Patriot Act and intensified a decade ago after Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, revealed the extent of the government’s bulk data collection.
Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and an outspoken critic of government snooping, revealed last week that the NSA has secretly been buying Americans’ internet records and using them for spying purposes without obtaining a warrant.
He called the practice a “legal gray area,” with data brokers quietly obtaining and reselling the internet “metadata” without the users’ consent. He said the NSA has been trying to keep the whole thing under wraps.
According to documents obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the federal government flags terms like “MAGA” and “Trump” for financial institutions if Americans use those phrases when completing transactions.
GOP lawmakers on the panel said that individuals who shopped at retailers such as Cabela’s or Dick’s Sporting Goods or purchased religious texts such as the Bible may also have had their transactions flagged.