On a Saturday evening just outside the venue of the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a violent exchange of gunfire erupted between an armed suspect identified as Cole Tomas Allen and law enforcement officers. The shooting came just days before a critical congressional deadline to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial law granting U.S. intelligence agencies broad warrantless surveillance powers that is set to expire at the end of this week. Within hours of the incident, former President Donald Trump moved quickly to tie the shooting to his ongoing campaign to extend the program, arguing the attempted attack proved the FBI must retain the authority to collect the communications of U.S. citizens without prior judicial approval.
In a Sunday interview with Fox News, Trump doubled down on his earlier position, stating he is personally willing to forgo his own security protections to secure a multi-year extension of Section 702, and claimed all Americans should be willing to make the same tradeoff for the sake of national safety. “It’s really needed for national security,” Trump told Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich. “Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA… I’m willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that’s to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation.”
Unlike traditional surveillance authorities that require judges to approve individual warrants for targeting U.S. persons, Section 702 explicitly permits U.S. intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of foreign nationals located overseas without a warrant. Because thousands of these foreign targets regularly communicate with American citizens, the law also allows agencies to vacuum up the emails, text messages, and phone calls of unwitting U.S. residents without prior judicial review, with approximately 350,000 foreign targets currently monitored under the program. When Heinrich noted that investigators have not confirmed whether Allen was radicalized by any foreign individual or extremist group, she asked Trump if the shooting highlighted the urgent need to retain the surveillance tool, prompting Trump to pivot to longstanding grievances over past FISA use against his 2016 campaign.
Trump complained that former FBI Director James Comey abused FISA powers to obtain a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign aide during the agency’s investigation into 2016 Russian election interference, before incorrectly claiming FISA powers had been used to support U.S. military actions against Iran and in an incursion into Venezuela earlier this year. To date, no public evidence has connected Allen, the suspected shooter, to any foreign actors; investigators have confirmed Allen appears to have acted alone, and a document he left behind references his Christian beliefs and criticizes the Trump administration’s policies on immigrant detention, anti-drug bombing operations in maritime waters off the Americas, and military strikes in Iran that hit an elementary school.
Critics of an un reformed Section 702 extension have pushed back on Trump’s attempts to tie the shooting to the surveillance debate, noting that the incident actually undermines the argument that the program is necessary to stop lone attacks with no foreign ties. Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, argued in a recent Common Dreams column that despite sweeping claims from Trump, congressional Republicans, and intelligence leaders that Section 702 has stopped dozens of terror attacks, there is almost no public evidence to back up these assertions. Liz pointed out that only one independently verified, well-documented case exists of the program disrupting a terror attack on U.S. soil: the 2009 plot to bomb the New York City subway system. In that case, the NSA used Section 702 to track communications between an al-Qaeda courier and plotter Najibullah Zazi, who was residing in the U.S., but the NSA only obtained the courier’s email address from British intelligence partners — meaning the successful disruption was as much a product of international intelligence sharing as it was of Section 702 itself. Worse, Liz argued, the incident actually highlights how Trump’s repeated attacks on U.S. allies ultimately weaken, rather than strengthen, American national security.
The push to extend Section 702 has already roiled Congress in recent weeks, with two separate extension bills — one for an 18-month term and another for five years — failing to pass earlier this month. Opponents of the bills uniformly objected to the lack of meaningful privacy reforms, particularly a critical loophole that allows government agencies to purchase private personal data about U.S. citizens from commercial data brokers without first obtaining a warrant. After the initial proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, unveiled a new compromise last week that would extend the program for three years, require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its searches of American data to an internal oversight official, and impose nominal penalties for misuse of the program. Privacy advocates have dismissed these reforms as wholly inadequate, noting they do nothing to end the practice of warrantless backdoor searches of U.S. citizens’ data.
The House Rules Committee was scheduled to convene Monday to advance the new bill to a full floor vote, and top congressional Democrats have already mobilized opposition to the measure. Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland circulated a memo to colleagues last week urging them to reject the Republican proposal, arguing that it “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data… FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge.”
The bill’s path to passage remains uncertain, as four House Democrats broke with their party earlier this month to support a procedural vote advancing the reauthorization, joining all House Republicans. Privacy advocacy groups have ramped up pressure on these four Democrats — Josh Gottheimer and Tom Suozzi of New Jersey, Marie Gluesencamp Perez of Washington, and Jared Golden of Maine — to flip their positions on the latest proposal. “It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at advocacy group Demand Progress, told The Intercept on Monday. “If they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and White House homeland security adviser Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”