U.S. House vote on spy powers extension delayed due to bipartisan pushback

By Thérèse Boudreaux
The Center Square

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is postponing a vote on a clean extension of the federal government’s electronic surveillance powers due to member pushback.

That leaves Congress four days at most to renew the expiring Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows federal intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on foreign nationals of suspicion.

After the 18-month extension passed out of committee Tuesday evening, Johnson scheduled a floor vote for Wednesday evening. The vote is now stalled until further notice due to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle objecting to the lack of privacy protections, endangering the legislation’s passage.

With the current U.S.-Iran conflict heightening global tensions and domestic security risks, supporters of Section 702 reauthorization say that foreign intelligence gathering is needed now more than ever.

Opponents of the extension argue that Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights are at stake, given that foreign actors of suspicion are not the only individuals whose private electronic data is collected.

The electronic data of American citizens – including emails, text messages, and phone calls – is often swept up as well, and intelligence agents routinely search through that collected data without obtaining a warrant.

Declassified government documents and oversight reports show that federal intelligence agencies have performed millions of these so-called “backdoor searches” since FISA Section 702 was created, including 57,000 in 2023 alone.

Section 702 of FISA was enacted in 2008 to retroactively justify NSA secretly gathering personal electronic communications between U.S. and Afghanistan individuals for years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.