opinion

Devin Nunes a hypocrite on vote to reauthorize FISA law

Incredibly, just days after the House and Senate voted to reauthorize and expand a surveillance authority that allows the secret collection of information about Americans, some Members of the Congress who voted in favor of the bill are now criticizing it.

They are claiming the law was misused to listen to communication from the Trump campaign, begging the question, if they knew a law posed a threat to Americans, why didn’t they work to fix the parts of the law that threaten American’s privacy most before they voted for it?

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allows the intelligence agencies to collect information from non-U.S. citizens abroad while sweeping up and storing massive amounts of Americans’ communications.

More: The Bubble: Media anxious to help hide deep state, conservatives say

House votes to renew surveillance law that may collect Americans' emails without warrants

Clergy wants Nunes meeting, again

Among the supporters of the bill that reauthorized Section 702 and codified warrantless FBI queries for Americans’ communications was Congressman Devin Nunes (R-Visalia), Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Now Nunes has released a classified report, currently available only to members of Congress, that claims to outline abuses carried out under FISA authority.

Democrats claim the report is riddled with errors and is a tool to discredit the FBI as it continues to investigate Russian meddling in U.S. elections.

Whatever the contents of the report, the real questions that must be asked are who knew about the report and when did they know it? According to Politico, the report was finished more than a month ago.

It seems likely, therefore, that Nunes, as well as a number of his Republican colleagues on the committee, voted to reauthorize and expand the most concerning parts of a law, even though they believed it was being used to sweep up information on Americans — or at least Americans in the Trump campaign — without a warrant.

It’s not that there was no way to fix the 702 reauthorization bill. Members on both sides of the aisle offered amendments to create transparency and accountability around the surveillance law.

In addition to requiring law enforcement to obtain warrants when they wish to search the database for evidence of domestic criminal wrongdoing by Americans, critical reforms would have required:

Reports on how many residents of the United States have their communications swept up in the 702 database

How often the FBI queries the database

How often information from the database is used in domestic criminal investigations.

Unfortunately, those amendments were not included and the bill passed with bipartisan support, extending the National Security Agency’s key surveillance authority until 2023 while consolidating the FBI’s power to continue warrantless searches of Americans’ digital communications without a warrant.

We don’t need a classified document to know that the NSA collected 151 million phone records of Americans in 2016 alone. Because of the secrecy surrounding the surveillance conducted under 702 authority, we can only speculate the ways in which those communications will be used against Americans.

For example, if Attorney General Jeff Sessions follows through on his recent announcement to vigorously enforce federal drug laws, he could urge the FBI to share information with the DEA that may implicate U.S. citizens for violating those laws, even in states like California where marijuana use is legal.

The FBI’s history of counterintelligence aimed at Vietnam anti-war organizers and civil rights activists suggests we are right to be concerned that today’s political protesters may also be subject to warrantless surveillance as a result of the FBI’s unfettered access to a database ostensibly designed to collect and store information only about potential foreign terror threats.

Yet those concerns were not enough to have most of the now vocal critics of FISA amend the most troubling parts of the law.

The president, too, was willing to sign the reauthorization bill despite tweeting, prior to the vote in Congress, concerns about “abuse” of the program. He quickly changed his position after speaking with Republican colleagues who supported reauthorization without reform. On Jan. 19, he signed the FISA Section 702 reauthorization.

Those who are now politicizing the FISA should be accountable for their actions, answering why they supported expanding the most threatening area of the law without attempting to fix it.

Lisa Rosenberg is the Executive Director of Open the Government, an inclusive, nonpartisan coalition that works to strengthen our democracy and empower the public by advancing policies that create a more open, accountable, and responsive government