One of the NSA’s most important surveillance authorizations is set to expire on December 31st, and all year, reformers have been looking at the reauthorization as a way to pare back the agency’s powers. But after months of negotiating terms, Congress is now preparing a bill with none of the proposed limits, and a number of troubling new measures that say could greatly expand the agency’s power.

Submitted by Rep. Nunes on Tuesday afternoon, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017 is based on a previous bill submitted by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), generally seen as the most NSA-friendly of the proposals. The current bill is narrower than Burr’s proposal in some areas, but makes a significant expansion to “about” collection, which allows the NSA to search communications that mention a given target but was not sent or received by the target. In practical terms, that could mean searching a message simply because it contains an email address, phone number, or other string of characters associated with a target.

“By far the worst option”

The current bill would codify that practice as explicitly legal — already a controversial move for reformers — and then expand it even further. The language in the bill would permit “about” collection for messages that merely “reference” a target, which critics say could be used to search any messages that mention names like “Osama bin Laden” or “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

The bill would also codify the backdoor search loophole, which allows for intelligence agencies to search communications to and from US citizens without obtaining a warrant, as long as those communications were intercepted overseas. While that loophole is most associated with the NSA, it also includes domestic agencies like the FBI, which the current bill says “has the discretion to seek a warrant” if the bureau deems it necessary.

The bill has drawn harsh criticism from reform groups, with the Open Technology Institute calling it “by far the worst option” for reauthorizing 702.

“If this bill passes, we will miss the opportunity to prevent the FBI from searching through NSA databases for American communications without a warrant,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in its statement on the bill. “Worse, nothing will be done to rein in the massive, unconstitutional surveillance of the NSA on Americans or innocent technology users worldwide.”

With Congress scheduled to recess at the end of the week, the bill is expected to advance to a vote by Thursday at the latest.