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Sinking Section 702 Wiretap Program Offered One Last Lifeboat


For months, US lawmakers have examined every side of a historic surveillance debate. With the introduction of the SAFE Act, all that's left to do now is vote.

The authority is threatening to expire in a month, disrupting a global wiretapping program said to inform a third of articles in the President’s Daily Briefing—a morning “ tour d’horizon ” of US spies’ top concerns. The biggest hurdle to reauthorizing the program is a dispute between lawmakers over whether the government should get search warrants before looking up Americans using 702; a massive wiretap database full of millions of email, voice, and text conversations intercepted by spies. As it’s generally trivial for law enforcement to obtain these kinds of records anyway, this is a compromise that doesn’t serve up a major loss for lawmakers on the side of reform.

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