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A Backroom Deal Looms Over Section 702 Surveillance Fight
Top congressional lawmakers are meeting in private to discuss the future of a widely unpopular surveillance program, worrying members devoted to reforming Section 702.
Sources with knowledge of ongoing negotiations over the future of Section 702—a controversial but pivotal US foreign surveillance program—say a host of pro-privacy reforms, including new warrant requirements for obtaining commercially available data, have gained serious traction among an anomalous coalition of progressives and conservatives otherwise at odds on most matters. Several aides attributed the drawn-out nature of the fight, at least in part, to the relative naivete of the House speaker on national security matters, saying that, with little experience in the area, Johnson had not previously had the opportunity to be captured by the intelligence community—powerful interests accused by congressional staffers of routinely deploying “fear tactics” to defend surveillance operations plagued by regular error and abuse. House members remained in the dark Monday morning as to the details of Johnson and Scalise’s purported plan for Section 702, and whether the compromise—potentially to arrive later this week —would include popular measures aimed at ending a prominent data broker loophole, through which US spy agencies are known to purchase information on Americans for which a warrant is typically required.
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