It should have been a simple vote to reauthorize an important law, but ideologues allied with exhibitionists to turn it into a circus. Throw in a badly informed Trump tweet, and we had a carnival of folly—which is to say, an ordinary day on Capitol Hill.
We’re describing the House debate on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, a law that allows the U.S. government to monitor foreigners talking to foreigners on foreign soil. You wouldn’t think such a thing could be controversial, but you’d be wrong: Privacy activists persist against all evidence in believing that Section 702 allows the government to “spy on Americans.”
It does no such thing. The law is the result of a hard-won compromise in 2008 between the Bush administration and its critics—before Democrats and most progressives took an eight-year hiatus from caring about civil liberties. The law as currently written allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners outside our country, as long as that monitoring doesn’t target Americans (citizen or resident alien) or anyone physically inside this country. There are many checks on abuse: The government may not target foreigners simply to gather information on Americans (“reverse-targeting”) and all 702-authorized spying must be approved by both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence.
Nothing about Section 702 poses a genuine privacy threat to Americans.
There may be reasonable points of disagreement on the law, but reasonableness wasn’t much in evidence during the House debate on reauthorization, with multiple bills restricting data collection vying for consideration and only a few members seeming to know what the debate was about. Meanwhile in the Senate, Kentucky’s Rand Paul—as usual unwilling to offer any reasonable compromise and preferring press conferences instead—began loudly and ignorantly threatening to filibuster the bill when it came to the Senate.
House leaders hadn’t expected much of a debate on 702 reauthorization and so hadn’t done much in the way of whipping votes, with the result that Section 702 itself—an essential tool in the fight against international terrorism—appeared to be in jeopardy.
Into the turmoil rode Donald Trump with a characteristically madcap tweet: “ ‘House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.’ This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?” He was referring to Obama administration officials wantonly “unmasking” the identities of Trump campaign officials in intelligence reports, which had nothing to do with 702 surveillance.
As the whole spectacle descended into chaos, House Republicans and the president’s own national security staff prevailed on him to clean up the mess. Hence a follow-up tweet an hour later: “With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”
In the end, the House voted 256 to 164 to reauthorize Section 702. We’re glad of the result—though saddened to know so many members of the U.S. House want to deprive our national security officials of one of their most important tools. Now the bill goes to the Senate, where it will again meet with Rand Paul’s penchant for all-or-nothing grandstanding. We’ll be watching. Let’s hope the president won’t be.
