By Jasper Ward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate voted late on Friday to approve the reauthorization of a controversial surveillance program, narrowly missing the program’s midnight deadline, and the White House said President Joe Biden would sign it quickly.
The new authorization secures what supporters call a key element of U.S. foreign intelligence collection.
“Democrats and Republicans came together and did the right thing for the security of our country,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said.
“We all know one thing: Letting FISA lapse would be dangerous. It is an important part of our national security, stopping acts of terrorism, drug trafficking and extreme violent extremism.”
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the legislation is one of the United States’ most vital intelligence-gathering tools and that Biden would sign it quickly.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is part of a series of authorizations passed after the September 11, 2001 attacks that allow American spy agencies to surveil foreigners abroad using data drawn from U.S. digital infrastructures such as Internet service providers. . The information is used to track enemy spies, rogue hackers, and extremist militants.
FISA has drawn criticism from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, who say it violates Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. The bill was blocked three times in the past five months by House Republicans at odds with their party, before passing last week by a vote of 273-147 when its term was reduced from five to two years.
The White House, intelligence chiefs and top lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee have said that failure to authorize the program could have potentially catastrophic effects.
Although the right to privacy is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, data on foreign citizens collected by the program often includes communications with Americans and can be mined by domestic law enforcement agencies such as the FBI without a warrant.
This alarmed both hard-line Republicans and far-left Democrats. Recent revelations that the FBI used this power to seek information on Black Lives Matter protesters, congressional campaign donors and US lawmakers have raised further doubts about the program’s integrity