Trump Backs Section 702 Reauthorization After Once Calling To 'KILL FISA'
· Reason
This week, President Donald Trump called on Congress to reauthorize a provision of federal law that allows the government to spy on noncitizens but can easily be used against citizens, as well. Lawmakers, including previously skeptical Republicans, have fallen in line and now support it.
"Section 702 is a key provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information," according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Government agents can then easily comb through any of that data, without needing to get a warrant at any point in the process.
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It also includes a built-in sunset clause, meaning the law will automatically be repealed unless Congress votes to reauthorize it every few years. It was last reauthorized in 2024, and it's up for renewal again, or else it will sunset on April 20. Some lawmakers want changes before agreeing to renew, while others, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.), want to pass a temporary extension that renews the law as-is.
Trump agrees with Johnson. "When used properly, FISA is an effective tool to keep Americans safe," he posted this week on Truth Social. "I have called for a clean 18-month extension."
This was quite a shift from his previous position on the topic. "KILL FISA," he wrote in 2024, "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS." Of course, just two days after that post, Trump told reporters, "I'm not a big fan of FISA, but I told [Republicans], 'do what you want.'"
On this subject, Trump had it right when he was posting in all caps. "The statute's defenders have always emphasized that it is not directed at Americans," writes Patrick G. Eddington of the Cato Institute. "That reassurance elides the fact that when an American communicates with a foreign person whose communications are being collected, the American's side of the conversation is captured too. Dubbed 'incidental collection,' the practice is not incidental but a predictable, systematic, and—from the government's perspective—valuable byproduct of the program."
With that sort of information in hand, it's all too easy for the feds to use it. "FBI searches of Americans' data are up," Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted this month. Between December 2024 and November 2025, the FBI conducted 7,413 searches of data gathered through Section 702 surveillance, compared to 5,518 the previous year—an increase of more than a third.
The government even recognizes the statute's potential danger. "Section 702 poses significant privacy and civil liberties risks," the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent watchdog agency within the executive branch, determined in 2023. "Although Section 702 targets can only be non-U.S. persons, through incidental collection the government acquires a substantial amount of U.S. persons' communications as well."
And yet when given the opportunity, lawmakers routinely fail to rein it in. In 2024, when Section 702 was last up for renewal, Democrats in the House of Representatives helped kill an amendment that would have required agents to get a warrant to search any collected data.
That trend looks poised to repeat itself: Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, voted for the warrant amendment in 2024 but said last week that he would vote to extend the law as-is.
"Allowing this authority to expire would put the American people at severe risk," Rep. Jim Himes (D–Conn.), ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. "In 2024, Congress instituted 56 reforms to enhance oversight of this program, and since then we have seen zero evidence of intentional abuse."
Of course, it's not clear how we would likely hear about it: The PCLOB, which warned in 2023 about Section 702's "significant privacy and civil liberties risks," was effectively gutted in January 2025 when Trump reentered office.
"The Critical and Common Sense Reforms that were made in the last Reauthorization of FISA must remain intact to protect the American People from abuses," Trump added in his Truth Social post. "My Administration has worked tirelessly to ensure these Reforms are being aggressively executed at every level of the Executive Branch to keep Americans safe, while protecting their sacred Civil Liberties guaranteed by our Great Constitution."
But the "56 reforms" Himes touted, and that Trump alluded to, weren't all they were cracked up to be. "This bill is not a 'compromise,' and its 56 'reforms' codify the unacceptable status quo," the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Brennan Center for Justice, and FreedomWorks said in a joint statement following the 2024 reauthorization. "Making 56 ineffective tweaks to a fundamentally broken law is not reforming it. Absent significant amendment, [the bill] will do nothing to prevent the government's repeated abuses of Section 702 to spy on Americans."
Eddington added at the time that the reauthorization "actually expands the reach of FISA Section 702 by broadening the definition of 'electronic communications service provider' in a way that will encompass cloud-based storage companies, among others."
Although Trump often complains—as he did this week—of being subjected to the intelligence community's abuses, he shows little interest in actually reining it in once he's put in charge.
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