WASHINGTON – Following a midnight deadline, the Senate voted Saturday morning to reauthorize a key U.S. surveillance law, after divisions over whether the FBI should be barred from using the program to search Americans’ data nearly forced the statute to expire. .
The legislation passed 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years. It now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden “will quickly sign the bill.”
“Just in time, we are reauthorizing FISA just before it expires at midnight,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as voting on final approval began 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day long we persisted and persisted in trying to achieve a breakthrough, and in the end we did it.”
U.S. officials have said the surveillance tool, first authorized in 2008 and renewed several times since then, is crucial to stopping terrorist attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage and has also produced intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations such as The 2022 assassination of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri.
“If you miss a key piece of intelligence, you could miss an event overseas or put troops in danger,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. here, domestically or elsewhere. So in this particular case, there are real-life implications.”
The proposal would renew the program, which allows the U.S. government to collect warrantless communications from non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization faced a long and bumpy road to final approval on Friday, after months of clashes between privacy advocates and national security hawks that brought consideration of the legislation to the brink of expiration.
Although the spying program was technically scheduled to expire at midnight, the Biden administration said it expected its intelligence-gathering authority to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month from the Intelligence Surveillance Court. Foreigner who receives surveillance forms.
Still, officials said court approval should not supersede congressional authorization, especially since communications companies could cease cooperation with the government if the program lapses.
House before the law expired, U.S. authorities were already scrambling after two major U.S. communications providers said they would stop enforcing orders through the surveillance program, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke under condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
Attorney General Merrick Garland praised the reauthorization and reiterated how “indispensable” the tool is for the Department of Justice.
“This reauthorization of Section 702 gives the United States the authority to continue collecting foreign intelligence information about non-U.S. persons located outside the United States, while also codifying important reforms that the Department of Justice has adopted to ensure the protection of Americans. privacy and civil liberties,” Garland said in a statement Saturday.
But despite pleas from the Biden administration and confidential briefings to senators this week about the crucial role they say the spying program plays in protecting national security, a group of progressive and conservative lawmakers agitating for more changes has refused to accept the version of the bill. the Chamber sent it last week.
Lawmakers demanded that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer allow a vote on amendments to the legislation that would seek to address what they see as civil liberties gaps in the bill. In the end, Schumer was able to reach a deal that would allow critics to receive floor votes on their amendments in exchange for speeding up the approval process.
The six amendments ended up failing to gather the necessary support in the plenary to be included in the final passage.
One of the main changes proposed by detractors centered on restricting the FBI’s access to information about Americans through the program. Although the surveillance tool only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications from Americans when they are in contact with targeted foreigners. Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, had been pushing a proposal that would require U.S. authorities to obtain a warrant before accessing American communications.
“If the government wants to spy on my private communications or the private communications of any American, they should be required to get approval from a judge, just as our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution,” Durbin said.
Last year, U.S. officials revealed a series of abuses and errors by FBI analysts who improperly queried the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and participants in racial justice protests. of 2020 and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
But members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, as well as the Justice Department, warned that requiring a warrant would seriously hamper officials’ ability to quickly respond to imminent threats to national security.
“I think it’s a risk we can’t take with the vast array of challenges our nation faces around the world,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
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