The Privacy and Civil Liberties Protection Board (PCLOB) has just released a comprehensive staff report on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Since Congress must reauthorize section 702 or let it die this month, the report could hardly be more timely. And its conclusions make a strong case for reauthorizing the provision.
- The report reaffirms the value of section 702 intelligence, including queries seeking information on US persons. The PCLOB learned of a number of threats to human life and infrastructure that were thwarted by data gleaned from US person inquiries; more generally, almost two-thirds of the President's Daily Brief contained section 702 information in 2025.
- Compliance is much improved. Targeting compliance continues to flirt with perfection, with compliance rates over 99%. In past reviews of the program, FBI compliance with the US person query rules has been a sore spot. It has triggered heavy Congressional criticism and numerous reforms. The PCLOB reports that the FBI has implemented all of the most recent query rules with 98.5% compliance, and that FBI US person inquiries have continued to drop dramatically, from about 57,000 in 2023 to 7400 in 2025. The PCLOB infers from the decline that statutory and administrative changes are deterring unnecessary queries, but it also raises a concern that the reforms may have made FBI agents reluctant to conduct proper US person queries.
The report is also a fount of information about how section 702 and the statutory changes adopted in 2024 are working.
