• Section 702 of FISA expires April 20, creating a deadline for Congress to act on one of the government's most powerful surveillance authorities.
  • Federal agencies are purchasing Americans' personal data — location history, browsing records, app usage — from commercial data brokers without warrants, exploiting a loophole the Supreme Court's Carpenter ruling did not close.
  • The bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act (Lee-Wyden) would impose warrant requirements and ban warrantless data purchases, but faces obstruction from an unrelated legislative rider.
  • Intelligence officials warn of national security gaps if Section 702 lapses, but reformers argue a clean extension preserves documented constitutional problems.

In eleven days, one of the most powerful surveillance authorities in the federal government's arsenal will lapse — unless Congress acts. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the legal backbone for warrantless collection of foreign intelligence from American communications infrastructure, expires on April 20. And the debate over what replaces it has become a case study in how Washington handles your civil liberties when the clock is ticking.

The law was designed to let intelligence agencies monitor non-U.S. persons abroad. In practice, it sweeps in enormous volumes of Americans' phone calls, emails, and text messages. The FBI has queried that database looking for Americans' communications hundreds of thousands of times — a practice that, until recently, had almost no internal oversight. A March 2025 opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court indicated that compliance has improved. An October 2025 Department of Justice inspector general report agreed. But "fewer violations than before" is a low bar when the baseline was what the FISC itself described as systematic noncompliance.

The Loophole Nobody Wants to Talk About

While Congress debates whether to renew Section 702, a parallel surveillance practice has quietly grown into something arguably more invasive — and entirely unregulated.

Federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are purchasing bulk personal data from commercial data brokers. Location data from your phone. Browsing history. App usage. Purchase records. The kind of information the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States (2018) requires a warrant when obtained from a cell carrier — but which the government now acquires by simply buying it on the open market.

At a Senate hearing earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel was asked directly whether he would commit to not purchasing Americans' location data without a warrant. He declined, stating only that the FBI "uses all tools" and purchases "commercially available information."

The scale is staggering. Data brokers collect information from cell phones and browsers — ostensibly for advertising — and sell it to anyone who pays, including federal law enforcement. As one privacy researcher told Congress: after a 2015 change prohibited bulk collection, agencies found a workaround. They buy it instead. With taxpayer money.

Over 130 civil society organizations — from the ACLU to FreedomWorks — have urged Congress to close this loophole, warning that commercially purchased data, combined with modern artificial intelligence, could enable the government to assemble comprehensive profiles of any citizen's life, automatically and at massive scale.

The Bipartisan Reform That Can't Get a Vote

The good news: a serious reform bill exists. Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would reauthorize Section 702 with Fourth Amendment guardrails — including a requirement that agencies obtain a warrant before querying Americans' communications and a ban on purchasing personal data from brokers without judicial authorization.

The Lee-Wyden bill has support from constitutional conservatives who see warrantless surveillance as a Fourth Amendment violation and civil libertarians who see it as government overreach. It is, by any measure, a genuinely bipartisan piece of legislation addressing a problem that affects every American regardless of political affiliation.

The bad news: the bill may never get a vote.

The Trump administration is pushing for a clean 18-month extension of the existing law — no reforms, no warrant requirements, no data broker restrictions. Just a quiet renewal of powers that both parties have criticized when out of power and defended when in it.

Complicating matters further, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida has announced plans to attach the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — a voter registration bill that passed the House on a near party-line vote — to the FISA reauthorization vehicle. The move would likely poison the legislation for Senate Democrats, and Senator Wyden has stated that any bill connected to the SAVE Act is "guaranteed to fail."

The result: a critical national security authority is being held hostage by a legislative rider that has nothing to do with surveillance, while the actual surveillance reform that both sides claim to want sits on the shelf.

What Happens If Section 702 Lapses

Intelligence officials warn that losing Section 702 would create gaps in counterterrorism and cyber defense capabilities. Former national security officials from both parties have urged Congress to act before the deadline. Those warnings are worth taking seriously.

But they don't justify a clean extension that preserves a surveillance architecture with documented constitutional problems — and they certainly don't justify ignoring the data broker loophole that lets federal agencies bypass the warrant requirement entirely.

The Fourth Amendment was not written with an asterisk that says "unless the data is commercially available." If your location history requires a warrant when obtained from a cell tower, it should require a warrant when obtained from a data broker. The Supreme Court has already said the privacy interest is the same. Congress just hasn't caught up.

Who Benefits?

From a clean extension with no reforms: Federal agencies that currently purchase Americans' data without warrants. Data brokers who profit from selling that information to the government. Any administration — current or future — that prefers fewer constraints on domestic surveillance.

From attaching unrelated legislation: Lawmakers who want to force a vote on voter registration policy without the political cost of a standalone debate. Neither party's surveillance reformers benefit.

From the Lee-Wyden reform bill: Every American whose phone generates location data, whose browser generates a history, and whose Fourth Amendment rights currently have a price tag on the open market.

Section 702 expires April 20, 2026. Contact your senators and representatives if you have a view on whether the government should need a warrant before buying your personal data.