The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act Tuesday May 10. The Act, passed in 2008, created what is now known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Section 702 is used for mass spying, and government surveillance conducted under the law unconstitutionally searches and seizes Fourth Amendment-protected communications. Indeed, in 2011, a judge on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) acknowledged the programs store more than 250 million communications annually in NSA repositories and that tens of thousands of wholly domestic emails were being collected under the statute. A report by the Washington Post revealed more: hundreds of thousands of Americans' emails were being collected and nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations were not the intended surveillance targets. The section is one of the core statutes at issue in our lawsuit against the NSA.

The Judiciary Committee hearing begins the first formal review of the statute by the Senate this year and comes in light of Section 702's expiration in December 2017.

EFF submitted a letter for the record outlining some of the fundamental problems with the statute. The letter urges the Committee to:

Limit the scope of surveillance or stop it entirely

Require the government to submit surveillance targets for judicial review

Prohibit backdoor searches

Mandate transparency and oversight

The full letter can be found here and the introduction is below: