Senate approves reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight deadline -bloggerheart

Washington — After a midnight deadline, the Senate voted early Saturday to reauthorize a major US surveillance law, after a disagreement over whether the FBI should be barred from using the program to search Americans' data. Should be banned, which almost ended the law.

The legislation approved 60-34 with bipartisan support would extend for two years the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It now goes to President Joe Biden's desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden would “sign the bill swiftly.”

“Right on time, we're reauthorizing FISA right before it expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said as voting began on final passage 15 minutes before the deadline. “All day long, we persisted and we persisted in trying to reach a breakthrough and in the end, we succeeded.”

US officials have said the surveillance equipment, which was first authorized in 2008 and has been renewed several times since then, is critical in disrupting terror attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage and that it also produces intelligence such as On which the US has relied for specific missions. 2022 Assassination of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“If you miss a critical piece of intelligence, you could miss some incident abroad or put troops in harm's way,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “You may miss a conspiracy to harm the country.” 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 the communications of non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization faced a long and bumpy road to finalization Friday after months of fighting between privacy advocates and national security advocates, bringing consideration of the legislation to a close.

Although the spying program was technically scheduled to end at midnight, the Biden administration had said it expected its authority to collect intelligence to remain operational for at least another year, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this month. Thanks for an opinion of which application receives the monitoring.

Nevertheless, officials had said that court approval should not be a substitute for congressional authorization, especially since communications companies could stop cooperating with the government if the program was allowed to expire.

Even before the legislation passed the House, two major US communications providers said they would stop complying with orders through the surveillance program, leaving US officials already scrambling, according to a person familiar with the matter. , who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity. private conversation.

Attorney General Merrick Garland praised the reauthorization and reiterated how “indispensable” this tool is for the Justice Department.

“This reauthorization of Section 702 gives the United States the authority to continue to collect foreign intelligence information about non-U.S. persons located outside the United States, while simultaneously maintaining important measures adopted by the Department of Justice to ensure the security of Americans “Codifies reforms to privacy and civil liberties,” Garland said in a statement Saturday.

But despite the Biden administration's insistence and classified briefing to senators this week that they say the spy program plays a vital role in protecting national security, a group of progressive and conservative lawmakers have been agitating for further changes. , had refused to accept that version of the bill. The House had sent it last week.

Lawmakers had demanded that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer allow a vote on amendments to the legislation that would try to close civil liberties loopholes in the bill. Ultimately, Schumer was able to cut a deal that would allow critics to receive floor votes on their amendments in exchange for speeding up the passage process.

Six amendments ultimately failed to garner the necessary support in the House to be included in final passage.

One of the major changes proposed by opponents focused 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 the communications of Americans when they are in contact with those targeted foreigners. Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, was pushing a proposal that would require US officials to obtain a warrant before accessing US communications.

Durbin said, “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, as our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution.”

Over the past year, U.S. officials have uncovered a series of abuses and mistakes by FBI analysts in inappropriately interrogating intelligence repositories for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including a member of Congress and a 2020 Participants in the racial justice protests and riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

But members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, as well as the Justice Department, warned that requiring warrants would seriously disable authorities from quickly responding to imminent national security threats.

“I think this is a risk we cannot take given the challenges our country faces around the world,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday.

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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.