The oversight board’s two Republican appointees are distancing themselves from the report, giving fuel to critics who say its recommendations would undercut national security.
Set to expire at the end of this year absent congressional action, Section 702 authorizes the U.S. intelligence community to collect the texts, emails and other digital communications of foreigners located abroad who correspond using the platforms of American tech companies, like Microsoft and Google.
At the heart of the current controversy is the three Democrats’ recommendation that U.S. spies and law enforcement officers be required to get approval from a special surveillance court before querying the trove of data collected under the program for information on Americans.
When U.S. citizens swap messages with targeted foreigners, their communications are vacuumed into the 702 database, too.
A bipartisan coalition of civil liberties-oriented Democrats and conservative Republicans who believe the U.S. intelligence community has become politicized has argued that those queries represent an unconstitutional “backdoor” around Americans’ privacy rights — an assessment the privacy watchdog’s three Democrats are now endorsing.
The two Republicans strenuously objected to the idea of court approval for those searches.
The board’s five members did agree that Section 702 was critical to U.S. national security and should be reauthorized with new privacy guardrails. They could not agree on what those fixes should be — punting the hard work back to Congress.