Senate judiciary presses for answers ahead of FISA deadline

Source Domain: cyberscoop.com

There’s a growing question on Capitol Hill as the expiration of sweeping U.S. government surveillance powers looms: Where is the Trump administration?

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Wednesday on the 2024 law that revised the surveillance authorities known as Section 702, a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Advocates have said that information collected under Section 702 — under which national security officials controversially can use U.S. citizens’ personal information to query a database for collection of their electronic communications with foreign targets without a warrant — accounts for 60% of the intelligence included in the President’s Daily Briefing.

But no Trump administration witnesses testified at the hearing. Nor did any testify at a recent House hearing. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said at Wednesday’s hearing that he wanted to scrutinize the changes to Section 702 under the 2024 law, which came in the wake of significant abuses of the authorities and is set to expire at the end of April.

“Today I had hoped to hear from witnesses about whether those reforms had been appropriately implemented and whether they’ve been effective, but I can’t ask those questions of officials from the government who are actually implementing those reforms because they’re not here,” he said. “We are three months from the expiration of Section 702, and the Trump administration, as best as I can discern, still has no official position on it. That is stunning.”

“I think it’s unacceptable that with just 90 days [before expiration the administration doesn’t know how it thinks about the program and has nobody here to explain or defend it,” Coons continued.

The top Democrat on the panel, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, also said he was “disappointed” the administration wasn’t at the hearing. When Durbin led the panel, he had administration witnesses appear before the committee six months…

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