Bipartisan Coalition Unveils Sweeping Surveillance Reform Bill Ahead of FISA Section 702 Expiration
On Thursday, a cross-party privacy coalition in the U.S. Congress introduced new legislation that would impose a strict warrant requirement for the FBI’s controversial backdoor searches of Americans’ private communications, bringing federal law into alignment with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional.
Dubbed the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026, the bill repeals contentious expansions of the federal government’s warrantless wiretapping authority while overhauling core pillars of U.S. surveillance law. The proposal sets up a high-stakes showdown with the U.S. intelligence community and its congressional backers, arriving just weeks before the broad global spy program authorized under FISA Section 702 is set to sunset on April 20.
Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Lee lead the legislative effort, paired with House Representatives Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren. The measure has already earned endorsements from civil liberties groups across the full political spectrum.
The bill comes at a moment when the U.S. surveillance landscape has shifted fundamentally since Congress last renewed the Section 702 wiretap program in 2024. Sponsors frame the legislation as a necessary correction to a surveillance supercharged by modern technology and gradual bureaucratic mission creep. Wyden noted that the explosion of commercially available personal data and rapid advances in artificial intelligence have “far outpaced the laws protecting Americans’ privacy.”
Davidson echoed that critique, arguing that Section 702 has been stretched “far beyond its original purpose” to enable unconstitutional domestic searches of U.S. residents’ data.
Section 702 was written to allow the federal government to collect communications of foreign nationals located outside the U.S. without a warrant. In practice, the program incidentally sweeps up massive volumes of private communications belonging to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and other people on U.S. soil. The FBI routinely scours this intercepted data to access Americans’ private messages without a judicially approved warrant — a practice privacy advocates call a “backdoor search.”
In a floor speech earlier this week, Wyden warned that Congress is debating reauthorization without a full picture of the executive branch’s secret activities. “There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans,” he said, noting that consecutive administrations have refused to declassify details of the unreported policy. “When it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
Over the past year, the internal oversight mechanisms built to check the government’s sweeping surveillance powers have been systematically dismantled. FBI Director Kash Patel, who previously criticized warrantless backdoor searches, reversed his position after taking office and now defends the program as a “critical tool” for national security. In May 2025, Patel shuttered the FBI’s Office of Internal Auditing — the internal compliance unit that drove a reduction in improper searches of Americans’ data from more than 119,000 in 2022 to just 5,518 in 2024. Just two years ago, the FBI heavily touted that improved compliance rate as a core argument for why a new warrant requirement was unnecessary. The FBI declined to issue a comment for this report.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has overseen a similar hollowing out of independent watchdog roles, including mass firings of inspectors general and the effective neutralization of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Gabbard also faces a whistleblower complaint alleging she shared National Security Agency intercepts with the White House for political purposes. Gabbard’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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dell.3030. |The elimination of these internal guardrails coincides with a broader push to deploy surveillance tools against domestic targets. As first reported by WIRED, after a 2024 directive from former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate urged agents to actively run more queries on Americans to justify the program’s existence, the current administration has carried out raids on journalists’ homes and issued a presidential memorandum redirecting counterterrorism resources toward domestic political groups. The worst-case outcomes reformers warned of during the 2024 reauthorization fight are no longer theoretical.
The Trump administration is demanding a “clean” extension of Section 702 with zero reforms, a position backed by congressional allies like Senator Tom Cotton and driven internally by White House adviser Stephen Miller.
The Government Surveillance Reform Act is the most comprehensive overhaul of federal surveillance law in nearly half a century. While it reauthorizes the Section 702 program for four additional years, it attaches strict new constitutional safeguards to all intelligence collection:
It closes the backdoor search loophole, requiring the FBI to obtain a warrant before accessing the private communications of Americans incidentally swept up in foreign wiretaps, with only narrow exceptions for emergency scenarios.
It explicitly bans “reverse targeting,” the practice of surveilling foreigners overseas as a pretext to spy on people inside the U.S.
It repeals the 2024 expanded definition of an “electronic communications service provider,” a sweeping provision privacy advocates warned would force millions of ordinary Americans and private businesses to secretly conduct surveillance on the government’s behalf.
It bans federal agencies from bypassing Fourth Amendment warrant requirements by purchasing Americans’ personal information from commercial data brokers, closing a gap congressional leaders intentionally left in 2024 when they stripped a similar ban from a defense bill.
“It is imperative that Congress enact real reforms to protect our civil liberties, including warrant requirements and statutory penalties for privacy violations, in exchange for reauthorizing Section 702,” Senator Lee said.
When congressional leaders stripped the data broker ban from the 2024 defense bill, they left a statutory loophole federal law enforcement has aggressively exploited ever since. “By not banning the purchasing of data, they left a giant loophole in our country's privacy laws,” a senior Republican aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
Reformers have gained critical backing from a landmark January 2025 ruling in United States v. Hasbajrami, where a federal judge ruled that warrantless backdoor searches of the Section 702 database violate the Fourth Amendment. The decision dismantled the government’s longstanding argument that the FBI can freely search intercepted data simply because it was originally collected for foreign intelligence purposes, giving the bill’s warrant requirement clear constitutional backing that was missing during the 2024 debate.
In recent months, U.S. immigration and border agencies have poured tens of millions of dollars into commercial surveillance tools, including a $22.8 million contract for Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR personal database, expanded agreements with data broker LexisNexis, real-time cell phone location tracking from firms like Pen-Link, and (as of February 2026) Border Patrol access to Clearview AI’s facial recognition database of more than 60 billion scraped public images.
Additional provisions of the bill end the warrantless collection of business records under a statutory authority that expired more than five years ago, explicitly ban backdoor searches and reverse targeting in intelligence operations conducted entirely outside FISA, and update privacy rules for modern technology by requiring warrants for web browsing history, search queries, location data, and vehicle telematics data now standard in most new cars.
A senior Democratic aide, granted anonymity to discuss legislative strategy, told WIRED that a number of Democrats who previously voted to authorize these surveillance powers now appear ready to back reform, driven by intense political pressure over ICE’s expanded use of commercial data under the Trump administration. Conversely, some Republican lawmakers who championed privacy measures two years ago now face pressure to abandon reforms and align with the White House. GOP sources say privacy-minded Republicans willing to defy party pressure will avoid focusing on ICE’s tactics and instead center their arguments on the reality that U.S. citizens are now surveilled just as often as people outside the country.
Aides highlighted the widespread political cognitive dissonance the Section 702 debate creates in both parties: “Lindsey Graham is fighting his ass off to sue the government, because he's mad he was surveilled. And he still supports the authorization of these programs. I mean, that’s crazy,” the same Republican aide said. “And there's going to be a lot of Democrats that support the reauthorization of FISA at the same time they're saying Trump is a horrible guy ... and yet they're going to vote to reauthorize the surveillance of Americans.” Graham’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Aides also emphasized a longstanding frustration for reform-minded lawmakers: the executive branch consistently prioritizes its own power over civil liberties, regardless of which party controls the Oval Office.
“It is imperative that Congress enact real reforms to protect our civil liberties, including warrant requirements and statutory penalties for privacy violations, in exchange for reauthorizing Section 702,” Lee repeated. Representative Lofgren added that without meaningful safeguards, the government’s unchecked access to personal data directly threatens American democracy. “Congress should not reauthorize broad domestic surveillance authorities without putting meaningful safeguards in place,” she said.
Section 702 sunsets on April 20. The two-year extension passed in 2024 — the shortest in the program’s history — was intentionally designed by lawmakers to force this exact reckoning over surveillance policy.
Reformers are betting that the 2025 court ruling, the public record of gutted oversight, and bipartisan alarm over the current administration’s domestic surveillance posture will give them more leverage than they had two years ago. However, the intelligence community and its allies are leveraging the ongoing conflict with Iran to argue that wartime national security needs preclude any new limits on government spying, a potent argument in a Senate that requires 60 votes to pass major legislation.
Ultimately, the upcoming vote will test whether the bipartisan coalition backing a warrant requirement can overcome these national security appeals, now that the internal guardrails once used to justify the government’s expansive surveillance powers have been effectively dismantled.
