[URGENT] Section 702

Accidentally triggered because doxx in Harvard because pro Palestine, now surveillance 335 million systematically. American can prevent biggest encroachment on your privacy rights since Patriot Act

DC 4.51pm

Since war started in Gaza Palestine, raising concern about doxx, surveillance each other. Especially for everyone leaning or aggressive to defend the rights of Palestine, and not limiting Harvard. In Silicon Valley, ‘guru’, very respected IT and startup investor Paul Graham also ‘hit’ by surveillance measure just because he’s vocal to defend Palestine. If renowned IT like Paul Graham facing surveillance, imagine ordinary people with very ‘few’ knowledge about IT. In France, just months before Olympic 2024, massive surveillance to Parisian.

What if the scale surveillance goes to 335 million?

Competing bills moving through the House of Representatives both reauthorize Section 702 surveillance—but they pave very different paths forward for Americans' privacy and civil liberties. Entire American at a fork in the road with the FISA 702 spy program. Of 3 choices, only one respects the Constitution and privacy.

House Republican leadership will meet shortly followed by a fly-in night House GOP conference meeting. Leadership's plan is to put dueling FISA bills on the floor this week -- one from Jordan and another from Turner. Turner is clean-ish, Jordan an overhaul. But the HFC is pushing back on dueling bill concept. This will drive a lot of decision making/strategy this week.

46 Top former National Security officials sign letter urging Congress to reauthorize FISA 702 legislation needed to fight terrorism, fentanyl traffickers and cyber attacks. “We cannot hamstring the U.S. intelligence community,” they write. “Section 702 saves American lives.”

That bill’s actual reforms are at best illusory. But it’s worse than that. The HPSCI bill would actually make it easier for the FBI to spy on Americans without a warrant. HPSCI’s FISA 702 bill has some serious, glaring problems. Most obviously, it lacks a warrant requirement for all “backdoor” searches directed at American citizens whose communications have been “incidentally collected.”

While both bills would extend the program’s life, only one of them can credibly lay claim to the title of reform. Legislation introduced last week by Representative Andy Biggs in the House Judiciary Committee would require the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to obtain warrants before accessing the communications of Americans collected under Section 702. The second bill, introduced by the House Intelligence Committee, contains no equivalent protection.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act (PLEWSA, unfortunately) secures a glaring loophole in US law that helps police and intelligence agencies buy their way around the Fourth Amendment by paying US companies for information that they’d otherwise demand a warrant to disclose. The House Intelligence Committee’s bill—the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act, or FRRA—does nothing to address this privacy threat.

What the FRRA does appear to do, despite its name, is explode the number of companies the US government may compel to cooperate with wiretaps under Section 702. That was the assessment on Friday of Marc Zwillinger, amicus curiae to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR). “These changes would vastly widen the scope of businesses, entities, and their affiliates who are eligible to be compelled to assist 702 surveillance,” Zwillinger wrote in an article with Steve Lane, a former Justice Department (DOJ) attorney.

Section 702 currently allows the government to compel a class of companies called “electronic communications providers” to collect communications. If the FRRA becomes law, according to Zwillinger, that category would be greatly expanded to include a slew of new businesses, including “data centers, colocation providers, business landlords, and shared workspaces,” as well as, he says, “hotels where guests connect to the internet.”

There are other, less-obvious—and more troubling—problems that can be found in section 504 of the HPSCI bill. Sec. 504 expands the scope of FISA 702, in a way that would make 702 applicable to hotels, restaurants, department stores, or anyone else offering public wifi.

Plestia Alaqad

Indeed, section 504 of the HPSCI bill would make FISA 702 applicable to businesses offering wifi. If this bill were to pass, and you went to McDonald’s and used the McDonald’s wifi service, the NSA could go to McDonald’s and obtain that wifi data—without a warrant. HPSCI bill is attempting to *expand* the scope of domestic surveillance in America — at a time when Americans are rightly demanding the opposite approach, and are reasonably expecting compliance with the Fourth Amendment.

Aside from the serious policy and constitutional issues presented by HPSCI’s shiny-object, Trojan horse of a bill, the HPSCI bill would be wildly unpopular with many Americans at nearly every points on the political spectrum. The HPSCI bill is being marketed aggressively to Republicans and Democrats alike. House Republicans are meeting at 5.30pm today to discuss the HPSCI bill, comparing it to a competing, well-written bill from the House Judiciary Committee, which would actually fix FISA 702.

Noticeably absent from HPSCI’s slick marketing is a recognition of (1) how meaningless the fake warrant requirement in that bill, which would essentially *never* come into play, or (2) section 504’s wanton expansion of FBI’s warrantless surveillance of Americans.