It says nothing good about the state of surveillance reform that Congress is considering flipping the Fourth Amendment on its head. In a bid to put a patina of reform on a key spying program, Congress is poised to make it harder for the FBI to spy on those whom the agency has probable cause to believe have committed a crime. But while this provides a layer of protection against invasive searches to those suspected of wrongdoing, there is no such protection for anyone else, which means it would be easier to spy on a completely innocent person than a suspected criminal.

The spying program—known as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—authorizes one of the sweeping, warrantless surveillance programs first exposed by Edward Snowden. It gives the government the power to make American telecommunications and tech companies turn over the communications of foreigners located overseas for purposes like counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterespionage.

Under one part of the program, often called PRISM, the government asks providers like Google, Microsoft, and Apple for the emails, texts, chats, stored documents, and other associated records of a target. Under another part of the program, called Upstream, telecommunications companies search for emails and other internet communications as they transit through the backbone of those companies’ networks. Under both programs, the government obtains the messages of the target (including any statements about American citizens) and the messages of any people the target might be speaking to.

The government calls the collection of those speaking to a target, which includes significant amounts of emails and other communications from Americans living in the U.S., “incidental” collection, though it is not at all incidental to the way Section 702 is designed to work.

Congress is rushing to reauthorize the program. While intelligence collection can continue through April, the law itself expires on January 19. Congress had all last year to reform and reauthorize the program, but the intelligence community balked at bills that implemented even minor reforms, such as one passed by the House Judiciary Committee in November. When Congress passed a short-term government funding bill last month, it tagged the same extension to the FISA Amendments Act, giving itself 20 days to pass a new bill. It is now on the clock.