Trump Uses Assassination Try To Justify Expanding Spying Powers

The president responded by complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency's investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign's communications with Russia, before saying FISA has been used in the US-Israeli war on Iran and in the US military's invasion of Venezuela earlier this year.

“It's really needed for national security,” said Trump.“Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA... I'm willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that's to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation.”

Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote last week in a column at Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers, and US intelligence agencies“make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this.”

“According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot,” wrote Liz, adding:

The suspect in Saturday's shooting is believed to have acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he was in communication with any foreign entities. A document he wrote 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 efforts to extend the program – one for 18 months and the other for five years – failed, with opponents objecting to a lack of privacy reforms and to a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.

After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans' private data to an oversight official, as well as imposing penalties for abuse-provisions that were dismissed by privacy advocates.

The House Rules Committee was set to convene on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a vote in the House, and according to NPR, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject the Republicans ' latest proposal.

The bill, he wrote, “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans' data... FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge.”