The Developer: “The United States government has, for years, maintained a legal mechanism that allows it to scoop up your emails, your texts, and your phone calls without asking a judge for permission. In a vote on Friday, after a week of theatrical congressional hand-wringing, lawmakers chose to keep it. If you missed the debate, don’t feel bad—it was designed to be confusing, and the people who benefit from that confusion are not you. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is, on its face, a foreign intelligence tool. Congress added it in 2008 to codify what the George W. Bush administration had already been doing in secret for years after 9/11: monitoring the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States. The NSA and the FBI got the authority to surveil foreign targets without going to a judge, on the logic that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t extend to non-Americans living abroad. That logic is defensible, as far as it goes. The problem is where it stops going. It stops going the moment you text someone overseas, or email a foreign contact, or call a relative in another country. At that point, your communications are in the database too. You are an American citizen. You have Fourth Amendment rights. And yet, under Section 702, federal agents can query that database without a warrant. They just need to assert that the search might yield intelligence on a foreign bad actor. The standard is, to put it charitably, loose. How loose? Between 2020 and early 2021, the FBI improperly used Section 702 nearly 300,000 times, according to documents from the FISA court itself, running warrantless searches on January 6 suspects, racial justice protesters, and other U.S. citizens who—innocent or not, which is beside the point—had no business being in a foreign intelligence dragnet. No single agent runs 300,000 improper searches. That is an institution behaving as designed. The court that is supposed to provide oversight documented it. Congress was informed. And the program was reauthorized anyway. The defenders of Section 702—the intelligence agencies, their allies on the Hill, the national security commentariat—have a ready answer to all of this: terrorism. Cybercrime. Chinese government espionage. Islamist extremist networks. These are real threats, and the people invoking them are not entirely wrong. The question is whether “the threat is real” is a sufficient answer to “you searched 300,000 Americans without a warrant.” It has historically not been considered a sufficient answer in a country with a Bill of Rights. But here we are…”