By David Morgan and Raphael Satter
April 17 (Reuters) – Congress passed a short extension to a high-profile surveillance law on Friday after failing to secure the long-term reauthorization pushed by President Donald Trump.
The brief pause comes after a late-night attempt to reauthorize the law for five years failed in the House. It sets up another round of wrangling over whether and how to reform what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the National Security Agency to surveil foreigners using data drawn from U.S. digital infrastructure. The provision has long been a magnet for anxieties over domestic surveillance from both political conservatives and progressives because it can allow the NSA’s law enforcement counterparts to mine the massive data trove without a warrant.
The law had been due to expire on Monday, but the House voted by unanimous consent to extend it through April 30 – effectively kicking the can down the road for 10 days to give more breathing room for negotiations. Senators voted unanimously to pass the House’s short-term fix shortly before 11 a.m. EDT on Friday.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there is some openness to reforms to the surveillance law but he said doing so would depend on details.
“We’ve got to pivot and figure out what can pass, and we’re in the process of figuring out how to do that here,” he told reporters ahead of the Senate vote. After the vote, Thune added a three-year extension to the Senate calendar, something that could help the chamber pass any eventual compromise.
“I don’t know what the House is going to be able to do, and so we’ll be preparing accordingly,” Thune said.
REFORMERS WANT WARRANT REQUIREMENT
A core demand of reformers on both sides of the aisle has long been to forbid drawing Americans’ data from U.S. intercepts without a warrant – a process sometimes described as a “backdoor search.” Speaking ahead of the Senate’s vote, one advocate said the 10-day reprieve provided a window to do just that.
“It’s time to put a bill on the floor that will close the backdoor search loophole and protect Americans from surveillance abuse,” said Jake Laperruque, a deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Whether there will be enough momentum for such reforms is not clear. Senator Ron Wyden – the reformers’ top champion – told reporters that a growing number of lawmakers “are not going to accept straight extension here, period.”
But several longtime Republican critics of Section 702, most notably Trump, have now flipped and are putting their weight behind the law. Speaking on Tuesday, Trump called upon Republican lawmakers to extend it without reforms, saying the military “desperately” needs it.
(Reporting by David Morgan and Raphael Satter in Washington; Additional reporting by Akanksha Khushi in Bengaluru; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus and Matthew Lewis)
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