Privacy advocates and the intelligence community have painted vastly different pictures over whether a powerful surveillance authority contains enough privacy protections for Americans, as lawmakers look to act before the program’s statutory authority expires next week.
At issue in the sprawling debate is the extent of the changes passed last Congress during the last reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, when national security hawks fended off an attempt from privacy advocates to require a warrant requirement for certain searches.
The clash over the spy authority is expected to once again be on display at the House Rules Committee Tuesday, about a week before the statutory authority expires on April 20. One of the amendments filed at the committee, from Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Eli Crane, seeks to add a warrant requirement.
The Trump administration wants to extend Section 702 for 18 months with no changes, and GOP House leadership has previewed a floor strategy that would leave little room for Republican defections. The administration has ramped up its messaging in the lead up to the expiration date.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a letter to a slate of lawmakers, warning that a loss or reduction in Section 702 would “significantly impair” U.S. security.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers want to see more privacy protections. And privacy advocates say many changes in the last Section 702 reauthorization measure merely codified already existing procedures, and the final legislative product in some ways expanded the scope of the program.
The advocates argue the government has not followed all the requirements outlined in the last reauthorization measure and has produced incomplete figures on searches tied to American information collected under the surveillance authority.
“The attitude we’re seeing from FISA 702’s boosters right now is, ‘If we can pretend it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said Tuesday. “But the problems are there. They are very real, and in some ways, they are worse than ever.”
The intelligence community has argued Section 702 is indispensable to U.S. national security, saying it protects critical U.S. infrastructure, helps foil terrorist attacks and assists authorities in identifying foreign actors targeting people in the U.S.
As for the changes in the reauthorization measure, one document posted on the intelligence community’s website said the changes “have been fully implemented,” and agencies dedicate “substantial resources” to protecting the privacy of Americans.
Section 702 allows the U.S. government to collect digital communications of foreigners located outside the country. But the program is controversial because it also sweeps up the communications of Americans and allows the FBI to search through data without a warrant, using information such as an email address.
Changes
President Donald Trump and Section 702 supporters on Capitol Hill have pointed to the 2024 reauthorization while arguing for an extension of the authority with no changes, something also known as a “clean extension.”
The FBI has also touted what it says is a trend change in searches associated with American information, known as “U.S. person queries.” Those searches, which can include the email address or a phone number associated with an American, are controversial because they are conducted without a warrant.
The FBI conducted 7,413 U.S. person queries between December 2024 and November 2025, and 5,518 in the 12 months before, according to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Those figures are a far cry from the tens of thousands of searches reported in prior years.
But privacy advocates say the FBI did not track the entirety of its U.S. person queries for 2024 and 2025 — when the lower figures occurred — as required under statute. That means the total figures for those years are unknown, they argue.
They point to a discovery that the FBI had used an “advanced filter function” in the primary system that agency officials use to store and search information acquired under Section 702, an episode outlined in a report last year from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.
The advanced filter allowed officials to pick a specific FBI casefile number, “using a drop-down menu or search bar, to review communications with targeted facilities,” according to the watchdog report.
The function allowed officials to pick from lists of “participants” who were in touch with “targeted facilities” and review communications, the report said. The Justice Department’s National Security Division became aware of the filter function in 2024, and assessed that filter likely generated U.S. person queries, the document reported.
But because the filter use was not previously thought of as a search action, the system was not set up to prompt officials to seek pre-approval for those searches, or to put forward a written justification for those queries, according to the watchdog report.
“Any such queries therefore likely did not comply with the pre-approval, written justification, and recordkeeping requirements for U.S. person queries,” it stated.
Further, a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, issued in March 2025 and made public later that year, said the National Security Division acknowledged it did “‘not presently have access to historical data’ that would allow it to determine whether such queries were compliant.”
It’s unknown whether those searches had the proper legal justification, privacy advocates argue.
“Both the number of FBI backdoor searches in 2024 and the compliance rate for that year thus remain unknown and (apparently) unknowable,” Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote in a social media post.
