Congress punts FISA reform as AI supercharges surveillance risks

0:00 for the best deals go to lumidio dot com the nate

0:02 just passed a 45-day extension of one of the most

0:03 sweeping surveillance powers in American law under the pretext

0:07 that Congress will use the time to negotiate some real reforms.

0:11 But don't let that fool you.

0:13 This is just the latest chapter

0:15 in a long bipartisan habit of treating warrantless

0:18 access to your private communications as a feature of the law, not a bug.

0:22 That's because for years Congress has known

0:25 that this law allows the government to read Americans' emails,

0:27 listen to their calls and search their private messages, all without a warrant,

0:33 without a judge's approval and without the person being targeted ever knowing.

0:38 And year after year, instead of fixing it, lawmakers simply extended.

0:41 They kick the can.

0:42 They invoke national security to justify their complicity and to move on.

0:46 So what exactly is this law?

0:48 And why should you care?

0:49 To understand why this matters,

0:51 you have to go back to the days immediately after the 9-11 attacks.

0:54 The country was grieving.

0:55 People were afraid.

0:56 They were angry.

0:57 And in that atmosphere, one of deep national trauma,

1:00 the Bush administration moved quickly

1:02 to expand the government's surveillance powers.

1:05 At the center of it all is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court,

1:10 the FISA court created after Watergate

1:12 to provide judicial oversight of foreign intelligence targets.

1:16 The FISA court operates in complete secrecy.

1:19 The government is the only party present in that court.

1:22 And over time, it has become little more than

1:24 a rubber stamp approving the vast majority of surveillance requests,

1:27 according to government transparency reports.

1:29 In the post 9-11 era, that already limited oversight was stretched even further.

1:35 Government transparency reports show that in 2025,

1:38 the court fully denied just four out of 287 surveillance applications,

1:44 less than and two percent.

1:46 Under section 702 of the law, that's the one that's been in the news,

1:50 the provision at the center of the current debate, the U .S.

1:53 government can collect the electronic

1:55 communications of foreign nationals located

1:57 abroad without obtaining an individual warrant for each particular target.

2:02 It allows agencies like the National Security Agency and the FBI to compel U .S.

2:07 telecommunications providers, like your e-mail provider or your phone provider,

2:11 to turn over data, including emails and text messages and phone calls.

2:15 And here's where it gets complicated.

2:17 When the government surveils a foreign target and their communications,

2:22 it inevitably sweeps up the communications of the American

2:25 who's on the other side of those conversations.

2:28 The government calls this incidental collection.

2:30 Critics call it what it is, a backdoor into American private lives.

2:36 Your email to a colleague abroad,

2:38 your phone call or text to a family member overseas.

2:40 All of it can be collected and then searched without a warrant.

2:43 According to a recently declassified report

2:45 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,

2:48 the FBI increased its backdoor searches on Americans in 2025

2:55 by 34% from the previous year to more than 7 ,400 searches.

3:00 More than 7 ,400 essentially warrantless searches

3:03 of Americans' private communications in a single year.

3:07 But experts warn that the number, alarming as it is,

3:11 actually probably understates the scale of the problem.

3:14 Now, the government's going to tell you that the FISA court provides oversight.

3:17 But it's important to understand what that oversight actually looks like.

3:21 The FISA court does not approve individual targets for investigation

3:25 one by one the way a normal warrant works.

3:28 It approves broad categories,

3:30 things like international terrorism or foreign governments for a year at a time,

3:34 granting blanket approval covering potentially hundreds or thousands of targets.

3:39 Who are the targets?

3:41 According ACCORDING TO ONE GOVERNMENT REPORT, QUERIES INVOLVING POLITICAL,

3:44 RELIGIOUS AND MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS OR individuals surged

3:49 from 227 in 2024 to 839 in 2025, a nearly fourfold increase in a single year.

3:56 The same report found that the FBI has

3:57 searched communications tied to Black Lives Matter protesters,

4:01 members of Congress, congressional staff,

4:03 journalists, political commentators and campaign donors.

4:08 The justification has always been national security.

4:12 And for For years, the response has often been,

4:14 if you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to worry about.

4:17 That thinking has always been the wrong answer,

4:19 because once you allow one violation against one group,

4:21 you lower the bar for everyone.

4:23 You make it easier for the next administration

4:25 and the one after that to expand those powers to an ever growing list of people

4:29 that the government simply decides it does not like.

4:32 And now we have a regime in power that's repeatedly

4:35 sick federal government powers against journalists and protesters and critics.

4:39 and administration whose own officials describe

4:42 political opponents as the enemies within.

4:44 So we don't have to wonder what happens when

4:47 a government like this is handled a tool like this.

4:51 Trump himself answered that question for us,

4:53 writing on True Social that he was, quote,

4:55 willing to risk giving up of my rights

4:58 and privileges as a citizen for national security.

5:01 Here's the remarkable thing about that statement.

5:04 Just two years ago, the same president

5:05 told fellow lawmakers to, quote, kill FISA,

5:09 accusing the FBI of misusing the very same

5:12 law to spy on his 2016 presidential campaign.

5:15 He was right, by the way, to be alarmed then.

5:17 But his objection was never to the weapon.

5:20 It was to who was pulling the trigger.

5:23 He's not alone in that reversal, by the way.

5:26 Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the powerful House Judiciary

5:29 Committee spent years as one of Section 702's most vocal critics.

5:34 He routinely cited a 2023 government report finding

5:37 that the government had misused the program 278 ,000 times.

5:44 He and some other Republicans, by the way,

5:46 voted against reauthorization of this program in 2024.

5:49 He championed the warrant requirement,

5:51 calling it the only way he would ever vote yes.

5:54 Just last April, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning, quote,

5:57 until we pass a warrant requirement,

5:59 the government's powerful surveillance authorities will

6:01 always be subject to abuse, end quote.

6:05 He's right.

6:06 Then Donald Trump called him and he flipped.

6:10 The motive is not hard to find.

6:12 If Republicans lose the House, as expected they might do in November,

6:15 Mike Johnson is finished as Speaker probably.

6:18 And the next Republican leader is going to need

6:20 Trump's backing in order to get elected and survive.

6:23 Jordan tried for the speakership back in 2023 and he failed spectacularly.

6:27 But by dropping this opposition to this bill right now,

6:30 he suddenly has a clearer path to the top than he's ever had.

6:34 Minority leader, if the Republicans lose the House

6:37 and the speakership itself if they win it back.

6:40 As Republican Congressman Thomas Massey put it, quote,

6:42 I think what happens here is that Trump probably

6:45 convinced the chairman of my committee not to fight.

6:49 And if the chairman's not fighting, there is no fight, end quote.

6:53 Jordan's reversal comes at a moment when

6:55 the stakes for civil liberties have never

6:57 been higher because Section 702 of the FISA Act no longer exists in isolation.

7:03 Alongside the government's own surveillance capabilities is a commercial

7:07 data broker pipeline where the government simply buys American-sensitive data,

7:12 sidestepping the Fourth Amendment altogether.

7:14 There's also a growing arsenal of AI systems capable of analyzing

7:18 that data at a scale no human could ever do.

7:21 Taken together, this is a new beast entirely,

7:23 a surveillance apparatus no previous generation of Americans

7:26 would recognize as compatible with our Bill

7:29 of Rights and it didn't emerge from one dramatic vote, by the way.

7:32 It was built through a series of quiet

7:33 extensions just like this one that happened

7:35 this week where no one wants to be the lawmaker who blocks it and forces reform.

7:39 The Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned this week that AI could allow

7:44 the government to process vast amount

7:45 of data to identify Americans for warrantless searches.

7:48 His conclusion, new tools require new rules.

7:53 Congress so far has written none and some of the most powerful

7:56 AI companies in the world are already being pulled into this apparatus.

8:00 Senator Wyden sent letters to the nation's top AI companies asking

8:04 whether they would consent to their technology being used to surveil Americans.

8:08 Anthropic acknowledged that it had already granted acceptance.

8:10 TO A SMALL NUMBER OF NATIONAL SECURITY CUSTOMERS, END QUOTE.

8:14 AND THAT FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION

8:16 MAY INCLUDE INCIDENTALLY COLLECTED U .S.

8:20 PERSON INFORMATION.

8:21 OPEN AI AND ELON MUSK'S XAI did not respond at all.

8:26 There's a simple reform on the table, a warrant requirement,

8:30 a traditional individualized warrant signed by a judge backed by probable cause.

8:37 The kind of warrant the Fourth Amendment has

8:38 always required before the government can search your home,

8:41 read your mail or tap your phone.

8:42 That distinction matters enormously right now because

8:45 this administration has become notorious for using a workaround,

8:48 relying on administrative of subpoenas issued

8:51 by agencies like the Department of Homeland

8:53 Security to obtain Americans' personal data without ever going before a judge.

8:58 Adding the warrant requirement would mean that the government

9:01 could no longer go into its section 702

9:03 database and search for a specific American's communications without

9:07 first obtaining a judge-issued warrant backed by probable cause.

9:11 That is the same standard that has

9:13 governed searches in this country for two centuries.

9:15 It is enshrined in the very text of the Fourth Amendment,

9:19 the right of the people to be secure in their persons,

9:23 houses, papers and effects against unreasonable

9:26 searches and seizures shall not be violated,

9:28 and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause.

9:33 No warrants shall issue but upon probable cause.

9:39 The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

9:43 Applying the Constitution is not a radical notion,

9:46 and yet Speaker Johnson has refused to allow a vote on the warrant requirement,

9:50 twice trying to ram through his own version of the bill,

9:52 one that lacks the requirement entirely and does

9:55 nothing to curb backdoor searches of Americans' data.

9:57 He ultimately succeeded,

9:58 pushing it through the House this week with the help of 42 Democrats.

10:02 The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee,

10:05 the Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut defended those votes,

10:08 claiming that the choice was binary.

10:09 Either reauthorized the program or let it expire entirely.

10:14 That's not really true.

10:15 It's a convenient fig leaf,

10:16 a cover for lawmakers who chose not to take a harder to understand.

10:20 The law would not have lapsed.

10:23 Surveillance could have continued uninterrupted through March of 2027,

10:27 regardless because it operates through annual certifications

10:29 that are approved by a special federal court.

10:32 What would have changed is the government's ability

10:34 to add new targets without explicit statutory authorization.

10:38 Companies could refuse,

10:39 courts could get involved and real accountability would be on the table,

10:43 meaning there was no real emergency here.

10:45 There was time to negotiate real reforms.

10:49 Lawmakers simply chose not to.

10:51 And that brings us to the original sin of the post 9-11 surveillance era,

10:55 that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

10:58 That argument was wrong then, it's far more dangerous now.

11:02 Because the question was never really about whether you have something to hide.

11:05 It's always been about who decides what counts as suspicious?

11:08 Who decides which communications should be examined?

11:11 Who decides which Americans end up in the database?

11:13 Who controls a tool that can dig into the most intimate

11:16 details of your life and the lives of everyone you know?

11:19 In a functioning democracy, those decisions require warrants,

11:23 probable cause, and judicial oversight.

11:26 In the system Congress just extended this week, they do not.

11:31 George Orwell understood something about surveillance that Congress

11:35 does not or at least pretends not to.

11:37 In his novel 1984, written as a warning about totalitarianism,

11:41 he described a world in which,

11:43 quote, nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.

11:48 End quote.

11:49 Everything else.

11:51 Everything else.

11:51 Everything you said, what you wrote, who you called,

11:54 belonged in some sense to the state.

11:58 Orwell wrote that in 1948 as a warning.

12:00 But how far are we really from the world he described?

12:03 Your emails are are collected.

12:04 Your texts are collected.

12:05 Your calls are collected.

12:06 Your face is collected, scanned and stored by surveillance

12:10 systems already deployed by this administration.

12:12 They sit in a federal database searchable without a warrant

12:15 by an administration that has already told you who it considers an enemy.

12:18 The door-to-backdoor surveillance was opened after September 11th.

12:23 It has been pushed wider every year since, and in the age of AI,

12:27 when the surveillance state is being turbocharged,

12:29 and what remains private is shrinking toward nothing,

12:33 Congress chose to hand this tool to an administration that has

12:36 shown us repeatedly exactly what it intends to do with it.