WASHINGTON (CN) — As the House prepares once again to vote on legislation extending a controversial government surveillance program, both Democrats and Republicans urged their colleagues Wednesday to tack on additional guardrails aimed at protecting U.S. citizens from what they view as unlawful spying.
House Republicans on Monday unveiled legislation renewing the surveillance authority, laid out in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The program, which allows intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance on foreign nationals who use U.S. communications systems, was set to expire at the end of the year — but got a short-term extension in December’s National Defense Authorization Act. Without another renewal, Section 702 is slated to expire April 19.
Extending Section 702 authority has been a topic of debate for months. Some lawmakers argue that federal law enforcement agencies such as the FBI have abused the system to spy on American citizens, pointing to reports that the agency has improperly used the program’s database more than 270,000 times.
The Republican-led bill unveiled this week aims to address some of those issues with a tranche of reforms. Among the proposed policy changes, the measure would erect guardrails on who is allowed to query Section 702 databases and would block law enforcement from searching the database for evidence of a crime.
The bill would also take steps to protect members of Congress and other officials, amid reports that the FBI used its surveillance powers to spy on at least one lawmaker in recent years.
But the legislation — an amalgam of language from two separate bills proposed by the House Judiciary Committee and House Intelligence Committee — does not include a search warrant requirement as demanded by judiciary committee lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
The proposed measure heavily favors the intelligence committee’s language, a fact which has proven a thorn in the side of some lawmakers looking for stronger reforms.
As the House Rules Committee met Wednesday to consider sending the Section 702 renewal to a floor vote, members of both parties criticized the bill’s omission of warrant requirements.
Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, who chairs the judiciary committee, told lawmakers that while the proposed legislation had some positive reforms, it isn’t good enough.
“It still relies on the FBI to oversee itself,” he said, “the same FBI who we know has done all kinds of things that they shouldn’t have done.”
Law enforcement should not be allowed to grade its own homework, Jordan argued.
“There’s checks and balances in our system,” he said. “So, we think you need a warrant where you have to go in front of a separate and equal branch of our government if you’re going to query information about a United States person.”
Jordan added that the legislation should include a provision barring the government from purchasing information from digital data brokers that it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.
“We think those are critical to protect the safety and liberties of the American people,” he told the committee.
New York Representative Jerry Nadler, the judiciary panel’s Democrat ranking member, found himself in rare agreement with his staunchly conservative colleague.
“The single most important reform we can enact to combat these abuses is a probable cause warrant for U.S. person queries,” he said, adding that the warrant requirement would “protect Americans and … allow surveillance laws to continue to keep us safe, while protecting our civil liberties.”
Nadler pushed back on what he called “handwringing and fearmongering” from the intelligence community and even some of his Democrat colleagues who he said worry that mandating search warrants for surveillance activities would unnecessarily hamper law enforcement.
“This is nothing new,” he said, pointing out that a “parade of hypothetical horribles” has followed previous congressional attempts to restrict law enforcement’s surveillance power, such as the 2015 vote to end the bulk collection of phone records.
“The horribles never came to pass,” Nadler said. “The sky never fell.”
Both Nadler and Jordan expressed support for a pair of amendments offered to the proposed Section 702 legislation — one that would implement the much-vaunted warrant requirement and another that would bar law enforcement from collecting certain data from third party brokers.
The rules committee was slated to decide whether those amendments can be eligible for a vote on the House floor, but as of Wednesday evening, debate was still ongoing.
Lawmakers pushing for adding a warrant requirement to the Section 702 extension were joined Tuesday by the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which held a press conference urging their colleagues to adopt such an amendment.
“Anonymous bureaucrats have abused this tool that was intended for supporting surveillance of threats to spy on American citizens,” Virginia Representative Bob Good, chair of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters.
Federal law enforcement officials have implored Congress to extend section 702 authority for months. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Senate lawmakers in December that the federal surveillance powers were “indispensable” to the agency’s activities, and that allowing the program to expire would be “devastating” and akin to “unilateral disarmament.”
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