The Trump administration pressed top lawmakers on Friday to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law within the next month, moving to resolve a thorny policy dispute in the last weeks of a Republican-controlled Congress.
In a letter to congressional leaders, three top national security officials in the administration — Todd Blanche, the attorney general, Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director — said President Trump had urged them to extend the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act now.
“As you know, Section 702 is the single most indispensable tool we have to keep our homeland and the American people safe,” they wrote. “It enables our intelligence community to detect and disrupt terrorist plots, cyber intrusions, and weapons proliferation. No other authority can replace it.”
But any push to bring a Section 702 bill to the floor — either by itself, or bundled with some larger package like the annual National Defense Authorization Act — appeared likely to set off a new round of heated contention. Privacy and civil liberties advocates in both parties have been pushing to add new limits, like requiring the government to obtain permission from a judge before deliberately gaining access to the messages of Americans swept up under the program.
In a statement, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and proponent of adding more limits to the program, said the issue should wait for the next Congress, when Democrats will have control.
“It would be unconscionable for any Democrat to hand Trump powerful spying powers, right after millions of Americans told Congress to stand up to Trump’s abuses,” he said. “There is time for Congress to pass real reforms to protect Americans’ rights and ensure warrantless surveillance cannot be weaponized against law-abiding Americans.”
Because of the Senate filibuster rule, the votes of 60 senators would most likely be required to bring a Section 702 bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote in that chamber. An extensive debate over the matter could interfere with efforts by Republicans to use their remaining time in power for other purposes, like confirming judges.
A group of privacy-minded activist groups also released a joint letter on Friday urging Congress not to fold a Section 702 extension into the National Defense Authorization Act at the last minute, arguing that would be “a betrayal of the democratic process.”
Congress enacted Section 702 in 2008 to legalize a form of the Stellarwind warrantless wiretapping program, which the Bush administration secretly created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It allows the government to obtain, without a warrant and from American providers like AT&T and Google, the messages of foreigners abroad — even when they are communicating with Americans.
The statute already expired in June amid a congressional impasse. Lawmakers were deadlocked over proposed new limits, Democratic pushback to Mr. Trump’s temporary appointment of an inexperienced loyalist, Bill Pulte, as acting spy chief, and Mr. Trump’s own vow to veto any FISA legislation unless lawmakers first passed an unrelated measure that would have tightened restrictions on voting.
But because of the way Congress wrote the law, the National Security Agency can legally operate the program until March 2027, when annual certification orders issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are set to lapse.
The debate over Section 702 scrambles the usual partisan lines, with national-security hawks and centrists in both parties aligning against an alliance of civil liberties-minded lawmakers of both parties. That makes the politics unpredictable.
In an interview, Representative Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat who is expected to become the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in January, said that he warned Mr. Ratcliffe and Mr. Clayton during a classified briefing this week that the Trump administration needed to work with lawmakers to renew Section 702 in the lame-duck session or risk contending with a new Congress that is far more skeptical of the surveillance law.
A renewal next year would look “radically different” than what might pass otherwise, Mr. Himes said he told them. He added that the new Congress was likely to impose a stronger warrant requirement on searching for information about Americans in the repository of intercepted communications, as civil libertarians want. Security agencies oppose that proposal, arguing it would hamstring the program’s effectiveness.
Trump administration officials addressed their letter to top lawmakers, including Senator John Thune, the majority leader, and Speaker Mike Johnson, along with their Democratic counterparts, Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries. The letter argued that obtaining a new set of annual certification orders and translating them into operating instructions takes months to complete, meaning the lawmakers should act by Dec. 9.
“To prevent a gap in critical intelligence and avoid putting our nation at risk, the government must start the 2027 renewal process by then,” they wrote.
But Don Bell, senior policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, called that deadline “completely arbitrary.”
“After months of refusing to engage on reforms that would protect both national security and civil liberties, the White House and surveillance hawks are terrified the next Congress will end the administration’s blank check for warrantless surveillance,” he said.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
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