Last September, I wrote about the battle to reauthorize Section 702 of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the legal basis that intelligence agencies use to force Big Tech to hand over users’ communications without a warrant. It’s supposed to be used to spy on foreigners—NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden made sure the world knew about that use case—but White House privacy advisors made clear at the time that Americans’ communications are also often scooped up.
Section 702 was due to expire at the end of last year, but Congress allowed a short-term extension to April 19, without giving it a full-blown reauthorization. And yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) again tried and failed to get Section 702 reauthorized, with the House voting against even debating it.
That means, unless something drastic happens in the next week, the War on Terror–era surveillance program could actually die in the foreseeable future. But because Section 702 permits the intelligence services to also get annual court approval for these data handovers, and they won that approval in recent weeks, the handovers would continue for nearly another year.
So what happened? Two things: Johnson chose to go with a reauthorization bill that critics say would have weakened rather than strengthened oversight of Section 702 surveillance; and former President Donald Trump wants FISA annihilated.
Let’s talk about Trump first, although his influence here is debatable (more on this below). MAGA Republicans are incensed that the FBI used FISA, in part improperly, to spy on former Trump staffer Carter Page. Section 702 had nothing to do with this episode, but never mind: Trump posted “Kill FISA” on his Truth Social platform hours before yesterday’s vote, which may have helped 19 Republican representatives decide to go against Johnson. (The Republicans control the House, but only barely.)
As for what lawmakers were voting on, that would be the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, or RISAA. There were other compromise bills that would have closed major loopholes in the program’s oversight. They would have required warrants when intelligence operatives wanted to search Section 702 for Americans’ communications, and stopped them from simply using data brokers to get American targets’ data without a warrant. But Johnson went with RISAA, which civil society organizations said would “further erode Americans’ right to privacy”—and he nixed an amendment that would have at least closed the data broker loophole.
Elizabeth Goitein, a codirector of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said on X that the bill failed not because of Trump, but because of Johnson’s decision to “block reforms demanded by members and by the American people.”
“The message is clear. If the [intelligence community and intelligence] committees want the government to continue collecting and reviewing foreigners’ communications under Section 702, they must end their insistence on allowing the government to conduct warrantless searches for Americans’ communications,” Goitein tweeted.
Goitein’s thread is worth reading, as is this piece for Bloomberg Law by Phil Kiko, a former House Judiciary Committee general counsel who was one of the architects of Section 702. He’s previously warned that letting Section 702 expire would “turn the keys” of surveillance over to whoever is in the White House. But here he argues that the provision’s use “has strayed further and further from its original legislative intent,” and it shouldn’t be renewed without “more robust safeguards to prevent dragnet use … to conduct surveillance on Americans.”
So stay tuned to see what happens next. More news below.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Amazon patent violation. An Illinois jury yesterday found that Amazon’s cloud arm violated the patent rights of storage tech firm Kove and therefore owes it $525 million, Reuters reports. Specifically, Amazon Web Services offerings including S3 and DynamoDB were found to be infringing on three Kove patents. Amazon says it will appeal the verdict. Kove is also suing Google for allegedly infringing on the same patents.
Meta politics disquiet. Meta’s decision to stop recommending strangers’ politically charged content to Instagram and Threads users has irked a lot of creators. A letter signed by hundreds of U.S. creators accuses Meta of “limiting our ability to reach people online to help foster more inclusive and participatory democracy and society during a critical inflection point for our country,” and demands that the political content limitations become an opt-in rather than default feature, TechCrunch reports.
Wartime DALL-E. OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator and ChatGPT chatbot would be really handy for the military, Microsoft said last year in a pitch to the Department of Defense, The Intercept reports. In case you’re wondering, OpenAI’s big sponsor proposed using DALL-E to “create images to train battle management systems.” Microsoft told the publication that this use case was not currently happening, and OpenAI said it doesn’t allow its tools to be used “to develop or use weapons, injure others, or destroy property.”
SIGNIFICANT FIGURES
$2.62
—The average rate per minute that Adobe is offering for short videos of people performing everyday actions, so it can train its text-to-video AI model, Bloomberg reports.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Semiconductor giant TSMC is riding high after a 16% sales boost and $6 billion grant. Its unique model is what brought it to market dominance, by Dylan Sloan
Europe’s antitrust watchdog probes China undercutting its $4 billion wind turbine market, saying: ‘We saw the playbook’ with solar power, by Prarthana Prakash
Europe’s probe into Chinese wind turbines is a ‘protectionist act,’ Beijing says: ‘Reckless distortion of the definition of subsidies,’ by the Associated Press
Exclusive: Oden Technologies raises $28 million for AI analysis of manufacturing data, by Sharon Goldman
Why CIOs are building teams of heroic ‘guardians’ to fight enemies with new AI superpowers, by John Kell
BEFORE YOU GO
AI-generated music. There are a few hilarious clips doing the rounds that have been generated by AI music services Suno and Udio, like a sad-girl jazz rendition of the MIT software license, and a snippet of a distinctly un-Villeneuvean Dune Broadway musical; this technology makes it really easy to whip up absurd songs. So I asked Suno to generate an alternative metal song about how single-ply toilet paper is a false economy. (What can I say? It’s what popped into my head, and it’s true.) The result is musically bland, but scarily realistic and also pretty funny, though heaven knows whose source material is being used. It really does seem we’re now very close to a level of AI authenticity that will turn the music industry upside-down.
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