WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate narrowly missed a midnight deadline Saturday to pass a reauthorization of the keys. US surveillance law The law nearly expired after disagreements over whether the FBI should be restricted from using the program to search Americans’ data.
The bill, approved 60-34 with bipartisan support, would extend the program known as Section 702 for two years. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bill now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden “will sign the bill quickly.”
“We’re going to reauthorize FISA in the nick of time, just before the deadline expires at midnight,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said as the vote for final passage began 15 minutes before the deadline. “Throughout the day we persevered and continued to strive for a breakthrough, and in the end we succeeded.”
U.S. officials say the surveillance tool, first authorized in 2008 and updated several times since then, is critical to thwarting terrorist attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage, and that the U.S. It also generates information that is dependent on specific operations. Murder in 2022 Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawari.
Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “If we miss important information, we could miss out on events overseas and endanger our troops.” “We may overlook conspiracies here, within the country, or elsewhere to harm the country. So in this particular case, it has real-life implications.”
The proposal would update a program that allows the U.S. government to collect communications of non-Americans abroad without a warrant to collect foreign intelligence. The reauthorization faced a long and difficult road to final passage on Friday, after months of conflict between privacy advocates and national security hawks that brought the bill to the brink of lapse.
The spy program was technically set to end at midnight, but the Biden administration has announced that intelligence-gathering powers will remain in place for at least another year thanks to an opinion earlier this month from the supervised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He said he expected it to continue. application.
Still, officials said court approval should not be a substitute for Congressional approval, especially since carriers could end cooperation with the government if the program is allowed to lapse.
U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity that two major U.S. telecommunications providers said they would stop complying with surveillance programs before the law was set to expire. He was already panicking. private negotiations.
Attorney General Merrick Garland praised the reauthorization and reiterated how “essential” this tool is to the Department of Justice.
“This reauthorization of Section 702 authorizes the United States to continue to collect foreign intelligence information about non-U.S. persons outside the United States, while also implementing the It codifies important reforms: privacy and civil liberties,” Garland said in a statement Saturday.
But even as the Biden administration this week urged senators to hold a classified briefing on the important role the spy program plays in protecting national security, progressives and others were pushing for more changes. A group of conservative lawmakers refused to accept the bill. The House sent it last week.
Lawmakers had asked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to allow a vote on amendments to the bill to address what they saw as loopholes in the bill. Ultimately, Schumer was able to strike a deal that would allow critics to receive a floor vote on the amendment in exchange for a faster process for passage.
The six amendments ultimately failed to garner the floor support needed for final passage.
One of the key changes suggested by critics centered on limiting the FBI’s access to information about Americans through the program. Although this surveillance tool only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications when Americans come into contact with targeted foreigners. Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, had pushed a proposal that would require U.S. officials to obtain a warrant before accessing U.S. communications.
“If the government wants to spy on my private communications or the private communications of Americans, it must get approval from a judge, just as the Founding Fathers intended when they drafted the Constitution,” Durbin said. There must be a need.”
Over the past year, U.S. authorities have uncovered a series of misconduct and mistakes by FBI analysts who improperly queried intelligence repositories for information about Americans or other people in the United States. Member of Parliament and participants 2020 Racial Justice Protests and the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Justice Department warned that the warrant requirements would make it significantly harder for authorities to quickly respond to pressing national security threats.
“Given the enormous challenges our country faces around the world, I think that’s an unacceptable risk,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Friday.
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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
