As he was running for another term in the White House in 2024, President Donald Trump made it clear that he was not a fan of the government’s electronic spying powers contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“KILL FISA,” he wrote in an all-caps message on Truth Social. “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS.”
It’s been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime. On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas.
Now, Trump says he’s willing to “risk” the rights of Americans in order to keep those spying powers intact.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!” he wrote. “We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!”
The context here is the April 20 deadline for reauthorizing Section 702. As Reason‘s Joe Lancaster detailed a few weeks ago, that deadline provides opportunities for members of Congress to demand changes to how FISA works.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), for example, tried to offer amendments that would, among other things, require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before trolling through communication records that end up in the FISA database. On the other side of the aisle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has vowed to vote against a “clean” reauthorization.
But Trump no longer wants to “KILL FISA.” In fact, he doesn’t even want to see any basic reforms that might better protect Americans from unlawful surveillance.
That happens a lot, as I’ve written before. In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in 2023 showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—targeting “crime victims, January 6th riot suspects, people arrested at a protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020,” and donors to congressional candidates.
The 2024 reauthorization implemented some reforms that limit how broadly the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can use the records in the FISA database. Despite that, The New York Times reported this month that federal law enforcement agencies have been using a new “filtering” process to search records without properly logging those queries.
That’s proof that more guardrails are needed, civil liberties groups say.
“This warrantless surveillance system is broken, and extending it absent reforms would be an abdication of the fundamental responsibility to protect Americans’ privacy,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement to Reason. “The answer for fixing the problems and endless abuse of queries is simple: If you want to query an American’s private messages, get a warrant. It’s time Congress enacted a warrant rule and closed this backdoor search loophole.”
It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes. Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles.
