Please Pick Up the Phone

As early as today, the House of Representatives may consider renewal of FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Act is, at its heart, a good law. Our intelligence community needs it to surveil foreign actors. Many foreign communications are routed through the United States and, at heart, FISA allows our intelligence community to spy on those communications as they are routed through the United States.

But FISA has been abused. We know it has been abused. There is documented evidence that FISA has been abused to not just spy on foreign intelligence routed through the United States but also to spy on Americans without a warrant, contrary to the United States Constitution.

A bill called RISA, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, has been advanced, seeking to fix FISA. Still, the legislation needs to do more, as it only affirms existing bureaucratic changes made by the intelligence community.

Currently, American corporations can sell the government their data about Americans, and the government can bypass warrants. In fact, the New York Times did a pretty in-depth story several years ago on the proliferation of that data and how it can be abused.

Conservatives in the House want that data protected to prevent the intelligence community from bypassing the need for warrants. Notably, federal investigators used warrants to obtain the cell phone data of January 6th participants inside the Capitol. However, the intelligence services regularly pay for the data in other cases to avoid warrants. That data allows them to spy on Americans.

Please call your member of Congress today. Conservatives have offered an alternative to RISA that actually closes the data loophole and ends warrantless searches of American citizen data.

Call (202) 224-3121 this morning. The Capitol Switchboard will connect you to your member of Congress. Ask your member to oppose the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act and instead support the Protect Liberty Act, which would close the data loophole and provide better auditing and oversight of the FISA Court that reviews intelligence requests.