Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that authorities under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 should be allowed to expire.

Whereas section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 ( 50 U.S.C. 1881a Public Law 110–261 Whereas the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 extended section 702 authorities until December 31, 2023; Whereas absent congressional action, section 702 authorities will sunset at the end of the year; Whereas the Intelligence Community has not been forthright about its use of section 702 authorities over the 15 years that section 702 has been authorized; Whereas both Houses of Congress have repeatedly sought to exercise their constitutional, article I authority to conduct oversight of executive branch use of section 702 authorities, and the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), has repeatedly and over multiple Congresses, failed to produce lawfully requested documents and witnesses to both Houses of Congress; Whereas what information Congress has related to section 702 authorities is often obtained from news reports, whistleblower materials, and even when produced is often heavily redacted; Whereas what data Congress have on section 702 practice are often incomplete, in part due to the Department of Justice itself failing for 21 months to comply with the plain language of section 112 of the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, mandating that the agency keep a count of its section 702 queries of United States person data, until two Federal courts held that they were required to do so; Whereas this Congress is aware of multiple abuses of the section 702 data collection process through released court decisions and aggregated data, which in itself is an adequate basis to sunset the program; Whereas the National Security Agency acquires more than 250,000,000 internet communications every year pursuant to section 702; Whereas the FBI itself has conducted 702 queries with callous disregard of the privacy rights of Americans, as evidenced by a redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion of April 21, 2022, including— (1) by conducting queries using 6,800 Social Security numbers; (2) by running a batch query in June 2020 of unminimized FISA information using identifiers of 133 individuals arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020 any specific potential connections to terrorist related activity (3) by conducting a batch query for over 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign; (4) by regularly (5) by conducting batch queries consisting of 23,132 separate queries, using presumed United States-person query terms, and running said queries against unminimized section 702 information, although the FBI analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query terms used; and (6) by conducting in excess Whereas that FISC court opinion concluded that [a]cross the FBI, the government has reported queries of raw FISA-acquired information as a part of routine baseline checks in order to determine whether there was any information regarding the subject [of the query] in FBI holdings, Whereas current oversight work of the 118th Congress does evidence that this pattern of abuses, in particular by the FBI, are not incidental, but rather a pattern of behavior warranting the sunset of section 702; Whereas even FISC Judge James E. Boasberg in a 2018 ruling observed that a large number of [702] queries evidence[ed] a misunderstanding of the querying standard—or indifference toward it Whereas numerous American intelligence, law enforcement, academic, and civil liberties groups have expressed sustained concern over the law and practice of section 702 collection; Whereas there is no indication that traditional FISA authorizations, requiring a warrant, are not up to the task of protecting American national security while also protecting American civil liberties; Whereas traditional FISA authorities are more protective of American civil liberties, including— (1) by requiring close involvement of article III judges; (2) by requiring approval both of the Attorney General and a judge; (3) by requiring an attestation that ordinary methods of information collection would not work, prior to having a warrant approved; and (4) by having time limits on surveillance; and Whereas no government component has ever provided evidence that section 702 has produced better outcomes than traditional FISA: Now, therefore, be it That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the authorities under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 should be allowed to expire at the end of this calendar year.

Summary: This resolution states that it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the authorities under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 should be allowed to expire at the end of 2023. (Section 702 establishes procedures for collecting foreign intelligence when communications travel through the U.S. communications infrastructure.)