Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief

“I have been doing this a while,” Sen. Ron Wyden told The Intercept. “And I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.”

For years, centrist Democrats like Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia dismissed claims that a key National Security Agency surveillance program could be abused to spy on Americans.

Then President Donald Trump tapped Bill Pulte — an unqualified housing official accused of misusing sensitive databases to pursue the president’s political vendettas — to oversee the nation’s spy agencies. That got the centrist Democrats’ attention.

Warner, who serves as ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, voted with every Senate Democrat except for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman last week against advancing the renewal of the NSA program authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

In the face of pushback from Democrats and some Republicans, Trump declined to back down on his choice. Instead, he said Tuesday that he was moving up the effective date of Pulte’s appointment to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to June 19.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a longtime critic of Section 702, said that there’s unprecedented support for reforming the law.

“I have been doing this a while,” Wyden, who is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “I am the longest serving member of SSCI in history, and I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.”

That doesn’t, however, mean that reform efforts hinge on Pulte’s political fate. Though the announcement narrowed the odds that the spying program will be renewed before it expires Friday, the fracas over Pulte has revealed a deep divide among Democrats that could keep the issue alive.

Centrists such as Warner would still vote to renew Section 702 if Pulte is sacked. Other Democrats, like Wyden, say that Pulte’s selection only exacerbated long-standing issues such as the lack of a warrant requirement for searching through the NSA’s data.

“Firing Pulte doesn’t fix the problem,” Wyden told reporters on Tuesday. “There have to be reforms.”

Section 702 has been the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes squabble since Congress passed a short-term, 45-day extension of the program in April.

Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law

The law allows the FBI and other agencies, including ODNI, to pore through Americans’ communications collected abroad without a warrant. Ostensibly, there are safeguards in place to prevent those agencies from targeting specific Americans — but courts have repeatedly found widespread violations of those rules.

For years, civil liberties advocates have sought to create a warrant requirement that would require the FBI and other agencies to go to a judge to read through Americans’ communications.

That idea has proven a nonstarter for........

© The Intercept