Warrantless Spying Is Here To Stay.

This essay appeared in the April 30, 2026 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

There’s no plausible defense for allowing FISA, the United States’ most comprehensive surveillance law, to expire, government officials and members of Congress have said.

“The moment that this becomes law we will be blind and will be unable to look at what Hezbollah is doing in the United States, what Hamas is doing in the United States, and what the Chinese Communist Party is doing in the United States,” said Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH).

“We have until Friday to avoid a dangerous lapse in a critical tool for identifying and stopping espionage and terrorism against the United States,” added Sen. Mitch McConnell. “If any of our colleagues believes that now is an appropriate moment to make this mission even more difficult, I’d be very interested to hear their rationale.”

“We will regroup and reformulate another plan,” promised House Speaker Mike Johnson. “We cannot allow Section 702 of FISA to expire. It’s too important to national security. I think most of the members understand that.”

Of course, there’s one problem with the hysterical reaction to the potential “lapse” of FISA—those alarmist statements were, in fact, made two years ago amid a similar battle to reauthorize FISA. And just as some predicted in 2024, some officials and members of Congress are repeating the same script, including Democrats, who are trying to hedge by defaulting to the “FISA can’t lapse” excuse yet again.

There are myriad issues with FISA itself, but one of the most disconcerting developments is there appears to be little incentive for Congress to finally give in, and take civil liberties concerns seriously. FISA—and the surveillance regime more broadly—is effectively a non-issue in today’s cultural and political environment. For one, there’s the war with Iran and its collateral economic fallout that has gripped much of the attention, especially since Americans are now starting to feel the weight of Trump’s war of choice on their wallets, as the price of gasoline increased by 27 cents in a week(!!!).

Most pressing beyond just FISA: The majority of Americans are now actively avoiding news related to President Trump. An admirable decision, no doubt, but one that has repercussions across the political spectrum given Trump’s ubiquity across media. There are few major national stories that his shadow doesn’t tower over—making it less likely Americans are paying attention to policy discussions or debates with profound implications.

FISA is one of them. And that’s partially why members of Congress, who hold the keys to our collective privacy, can escape political damage from voting to continue to erode our civil liberties.

“This is an essential tool for national security,” Johnson said last month. “We cannot allow it to expire, and we won’t.” (Let’s remind you what he said in 2024: “We cannot allow Section 702 of FISA to expire. It’s too important to national security. I think most of the members understand that.”)

“Especially given the current threat environment, it’s imperative Congress doesn’t allow this critical authority to lapse,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said earlier this month. “We must ensure American lives aren’t put at risk by a potential Section 702 expiration on April 20. The best path forward is for the House to pass a clean, 18-month FISA extension.”

Not only are they using the same talking points from 2024, but they’re hellbent on repeating the same weak strategy: a short-term extension.

Congress, with the help of 42 Democrats, passed the FISA reauthorization Wednesday night. It awaits an uncertain future in the Senate, where it’ll reportedly receive more scrutiny.

For the uninitiated, since 2008, FISA has permitted the collection of electronic communications of foreign nationals outside of the United States. However, given that Americans don’t live in silos and the internet enables communications beyond state borders, it has led to the collection of data from people inside the United States, which civil liberties experts have long argued is the inherent problem with FISA. Of course, FISA didn’t exist before digital data became a billion-dollar business, which intelligence agencies use as an end-around to grab people’s data—what opponents of reauthorization refer to as the “data broker loophole.”

Here’s what the Brennan Center for Justice said about the loophole back in 2024:

“This underregulated data broker ecosystem, built to target consumers with ads, also engenders ever-increasing risks of data breaches; discrimination in housing, employment, and credit decisions; and dragnet surveillance by government agencies that can acquire vast amounts of personal information without legal process.”

“Unfettered government access to personal data without judicial or legislative oversight can exacerbate existing biases in law enforcement and intelligence practices, permitting speculative investigations on the basis of constitutionally protected categories and the targeting of marginalized communities,” it added. “Evidence of this phenomenon abounds, from the Defense Department purchasing location data collected from prayer apps to monitor Muslim communities to police departments purchasing information to track racial justice protesters.”

And that’s not the only loophole the government has at its disposal. As the government uses Section 702 of FISA to collect data from outside the United States, it inevitably accumulates data from Americans as well. That information is stored, to various degrees, and is available to intelligence agencies performing so-called “backdoor searches.”

As the Brennan Center explains: “[T]he FBI, CIA, and NSA routinely search through Section 702 data for the express purpose of finding and reviewing the content of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and text messages. The FBI conducted over 57,000 of these ‘backdoor searches’ in 2023 alone, the last year for which the government might have provided complete data. An authority to target foreigners has thus become a powerful domestic spying tool.”

That’s the regime lawmakers across the aisle don’t want to “lapse”—a regime that allows an FBI run by a beer-chugging and allegedly absentee director in Kash Patel to syphon people’s private information, which he effectively admitted is the FBI’s practice. These loopholes were already frightening to anyone who cherishes their privacy, now imagine what will happen as AI firms become further embedded in government systems.

Naturally, this has been a bipartisan affair, with the surveillance apparatus winning out repeatedly. With another extension in the works, lawmakers in three years will traffic in the same fake narrative of not being able to risk FISA from “lapsing.” So long as surveillance-regime captured corporate media provides cover for them, there will be no urgency to sunset FISA once and for all. But even then, who needs the media to do the government’s work when no one is paying attention, anyway?