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Trump Loyalists Kill Vote on US Wiretap Program
An attempt to reauthorize Section 702, the so-called crown jewel of US spy powers, failed for a third time in the House of Representatives after former president Donald Trump criticized the law.
For the third time since December, House Speaker Mike Johnson has failed to wrangle support for reauthorizing a critical US surveillance program, raising questions about the future of a law that compels certain businesses to wiretap foreigners on the government’s behalf. An unlikely coalition of progressives and conservative lawmakers formed last year in a push to end these warrantless searches, many of the Republicans involved vocal critics of the FBI following its misuse of FISA to target a Trump campaign staffer in 2016. Declassified filings released by the FISA court last year revealed that the FBI had misused the 702 program more than 278,000 times, including, as reported by The Washington Post, against “crime victims, Jan. 6 riot suspects, people arrested at protests after the policing killing of George Floyd in 2020 and—in one case—19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.”
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