An exchange of gunshots between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside The White House The correspondents’ dinner on Saturday came days before a deadline to extend broad government and presidential surveillance powers Donald Trump wasted no time in claiming that the attempted attack on the event proved that FBI should be allowed to spy on Americans without a warrant.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump repeated his earlier remarks that he is “willing to give up (his) security” in favor of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which expires on Thursday – and suggested that other Americans should do the same for “the security of our nation.”
Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to monitor the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Since some of the nearly 350,000 foreign nationals whose communications are collected under the law are in contact with Americans, Section 702 allows the collection of U.S. citizens’ emails, text messages, and phone calls.
Fox host Jacqui Heinrich stressed that “we don’t know right now” whether Saturday’s shooting suspect, Cole Thomas Allen, “was radicalized” by a foreign individual or group, but asked if the attack drove home “the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these types of threats.”
The president responded by complaining that the former FBI director James Comey used FISA will receive warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency’s investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign’s communications with Russia, before it said FISA was used in the US-Israeli war against Iran and the US military’s invasion of Venezuela at the beginning of this year.
“It’s really necessary for national security,” Trump said. “Iran has been destroyed and we’ve gotten a lot of information using FISA … I’m willing to give up my security for the military because at the end of the day that’s the highest cause for me is, you know, the security of our nation.”
Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, has written Last week in a column in Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers and US intelligence agencies “make sweeping claims about the terrorist attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to back it up.”
“According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently proven case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot,” Liz wrote, adding:
In that case, Section 702 was used by the (National Security Agency) to trace an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who lived in the US. of nThe passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and stopped the attack before it happened.
Crucially, however, the NSA allegedly obtained the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British intelligence partners.
At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing among the Allies. Rather than proving the necessity of Section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s insane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security.
The suspect in Saturday’s shooting is believed to have acted alone and there is no evidence that he was in communication with any foreign entity. A document he has written alluded to his Christian beliefs and to reports of the administration’s abuse of immigrants in detention centers, its boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.
The president has been pushing in recent weeks for an extension of Section 702. The program was last reauthorized in 2024 and earlier this month two attempts to extend the program – one for 18 months and the other for five years – failed, with opponents arguing the lack of privacy reforms and in a vacuum allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.
After them proposals failed, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week discovered a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans’ private records to an oversight official, as well as impose penalties for abuse — provisions that were rejected by privacy advocates.
The House Rules Committee was set to meet on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a House vote, and according to THE NPRRep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject it The RepublicansThe last proposal.
The bill, he wrote, “It continues the FBI’s disastrous trust policy to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and behind-the-scenes searches of Americans’ records…FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any judicial review.”
Four Democrats in the House — Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NJ), Marie Gluesencamp Perez (D-Wash.) and Jared Golden (D-Maine) — broke with the party and they joined THE GOP earlier this month in supporting a procedural vote to advance the reauthorization of Section 702. Privacy advocates are increasing pressure on them to oppose the latest proposal for an extension.
“It all depends on those four and where they land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress. said The Intercept on Monday, “and if they’re going to continue to try to extradite Trump and (the White House homeland security adviser) Stephen Miller Surveillance authorities without guarantees, without any kind of checks or reforms to ensure that they are not violating civil liberties.”
