WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans will try again Friday for a bill that would reauthorize a key national security surveillance program; A second attempt was made just days after a conservative outcry prevented similar legislation from being introduced.
Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to put forward a Plan B that would reform a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act known as Section 702 and extend it for a shortened two-year period. The shorter timeline will impress GOP critics.
“We will try to find a way to unlock the rule. And I think it’s possible,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday evening, referring to the step needed to bring the legislation to the floor. “So there are some differences of opinion. But I think everyone, most people, understand the need to do this right and do this.”
It’s unclear whether Johnson, who has called the program “critical” to national security, will get the Republican support needed to move forward.
Suspicions about the government’s spying powers have increased dramatically in recent years, especially on the right. Republicans have been clashing for months over what a legislative overhaul of the surveillance program should look like, creating divisions that spread across the House floor this week, with 19 Republicans leaving their party to block the bill from coming to a vote.
But some early opponents signaled support for the new plan late Thursday.
“The two-year time frame is a much better landing point because it gives us two years instead of throwing five years to see if these things will work,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said Thursday. “They say these reforms will work. I think we’ll find out.”
The law would allow the U.S. government to collect communications without a warrant from non-Americans outside the country for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence. Reauthorization is now linked to a series of reforms aimed at satisfying critics who complain about civil liberties violations against Americans.
But far-right opponents complained that these changes did not go far enough. Among those slandering are Johnson’s harshest critics; members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, who have railed against the speaker for the past several months for reaching across the aisle to carry out basic functions of government.
To appease some of those critics, Johnson plans to introduce a separate proposal next week that would close the loophole that allows U.S. officials to collect data on Americans from big tech companies without a warrant.
“All of this has added something that I think gives me greater comfort,” Roy said.
The bill’s passage in the House depends on GOP support, as Democrats on Thursday refused to help Johnson break the impasse on the legislation.
Although the program will technically expire on April 19, the Biden administration has said it expects the intelligence-gathering authority to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which hears surveillance applications. . But officials say court approval should not replace congressional approval, especially given that communications companies could end cooperation with the government.
The spying tool, first authorized in 2008, has been revamped several times since then as U.S. officials see it as vital to thwarting terrorist attacks, cyberattacks and foreign espionage. It also produced intelligence that the United States relied on for certain operations.
But the administration’s efforts to get the program reauthorized have repeatedly faced fierce, bipartisan pushback from Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden, who has long advocated for civil liberties and is aligned with Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump, who shared a post on Truth Social. He falsely stated on Wednesday that Section 702 was being used to spy on the presidential campaign.
“Kill FISA,” Trump wrote in all caps. “It was used illegally against me and many others. “They spied on my campaign.” A former adviser to the 2016 presidential campaign was targeted for his oversight of possible ties to Russia under a different section of the law.
A particular area of concern for lawmakers is the FBI’s use of its vast cache of intelligence to seek information about Americans and others in the United States. Although the surveillance program only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications from Americans while they are in the United States. contact with targeted strangers.
Last year, U.S. officials revealed a series of abuses and errors by FBI analysts when they improperly interrogated the intelligence warehouse for information about a member of Congress and participants in the 2020 racial justice protests and about Americans or others in the United States. January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.
These violations led to demands that the FBI obtain warrants before conducting database searches on Americans; FBI director Chris Wray warned that this would effectively undermine the program’s effectiveness and would also be legally unnecessary, given that the information in the database was already legally stored. collected.
“While it is imperative to ensure that this critical authority of the 702 is not lost, we must also not reduce the effectiveness of this important tool by a warrant requirement or similar restriction, which will cripple our ability to combat fast-moving threats,” Wray said. In his speech on Tuesday.
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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.