WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s administration urged Congress on Tuesday to renew a surveillance program seen as vital to countering terrorism, cyberattacks and foreign spying operations.
The program, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives U.S. spy agencies broad powers to monitor and examine the communications of foreigners outside the United States. It will expire at the end of the year unless Congress renews it.
Democratic administration officials are bracing for a rough debate in the chambers as civil liberties advocates line up with Republicans to question the scope of the government’s spying powers.
In an effort to preemptively respond to privacy concerns, intelligence and national security officials brought the discussion into the public arena Tuesday with arguments that the endangered statutory powers have provided important information about “ransomware” (extortionist software) attacks on crucial infrastructure facilities, thwarted attempts to recruit spies and contributed to the killing of Ayman al-Zawahri, an Al Qaeda leader, with a drone last August.
Most contentious is a FISA clause called Section 702, which allows spy agencies to collect vast amounts of foreign communications. Civic rights advocates question it because it allows them to incidentally collect information from Americans when they have contact with foreigners who are under surveillance.
Section 702 was added to FISA in 2008 and renewed for six years in 2018, when then-President Donald Trump, a usually fierce critic of intelligence agencies, tweeted his opposition to the program, but later retracted it.
The renewal fight this year comes in a polarized political climate in which Republicans, still furious with the FBI for its mistakes in investigating ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, portray themselves as skeptical of the need to give the government broad spying powers and argue that the powers lend themselves to abuses and excesses.