Renew surveillance powers, NSA chief urges lawmakers

Law expires at year-end in Congress probing ‘weaponized’ government

WASHINGTON — A top U.S. intelligence official urged Congress Thursday to renew powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats.

The remarks by Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, opened what’s expected to be a contentious debate over provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that expire at year’s end.

The new GOP majority in the U.S. House has already formed a panel on the “weaponization of the federal government.” Progressive Democrats have pushed for more curbs on no-warrant surveillance.

The NSA and other spy agencies use authorities under FISA’s Section 702 to collect swaths of foreign communications, which also results in the incidental collection of emails and calls from Americans. The law prohibits spy agencies from targeting Americans and requires the FBI to seek a court order to access a U.S. citizen’s communications.

Section 702 was first added to FISA in 2008 and renewed for six years in 2018, when Trump originally tweeted opposition to the program but then reversed it.

Nakasone argued the law “plays an outsize role in protecting the nation” and generates “some of the U.S. government’s most valuable intelligence on our most challenging targets.”

He gave several broad examples of that work, including the discovery of attempts to steal sensitive U.S. technology, stopping the transfer of weapons components, preventing cyberattacks, and “understanding the strategic intentions” of China and Russia.

“We have saved lives because of 702,” Nakasone told a virtual meeting of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

The general said he could not publicly share more details about the impact of that surveillance. Civil liberties advocates have criticized the secrecy of intelligence court proceedings and the power agencies have to collect years of incidental data on Americans.

Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Congress had created an effective “national security exception to the U.S. Constitution.”

“The American people and indeed people all around the world have lost the ability to have a private conversation over digital networks,” she told the board. Section 702, Cohn said, “was a mass monitoring infrastructure that subjects people’s communications to NSA review.”

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee and other national security hawks are expected to push GOP colleagues to support a renewal this year accompanied by still-unspecified changes.

“We’ve got to have a discussion within our own caucus, but I feel good about the groundwork we’ve laid,” said Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who will lead the House’s new select committee on China, in an interview this week. “Part of the process of getting renewal is to put in place reform that gives people confidence that there won’t be abuses in the future.”