The FBI Is Quietly Spying on Americans. The FISA Fight Could Stop It
· Time
A law that has allowed federal law enforcement and national security agencies to access the private communications of American citizens without a warrant for years is facing a bipartisan challenge in Congress.
A key provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), set to expire on April 30, has been used by investigators to intentionally access Americans’ data for domestic investigations through "backdoor queries," without judicial sign-off and with little transparency.
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According to a recently declassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI increased its searches on Americans in 2025 by 34% from the previous year, to more than 7,000.
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As the deadline approaches, a growing number of lawmakers are opposing a clean extension of the controversial provision, Section 702, without meaningful reforms, despite mounting pressure from the White House.
If successful, lawmakers could dramatically reduce the government's power to spy on Americans at a time when such surveillance is escalating sharply.
In an interview with TIME, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime advocate for Section 702 reform, says he believes federal lawmakers have "opportunities that we've never had before" to curtail its power.
"The fact that all the Democrats but four said they wanted more than a straight authorization, the fact that we have Republicans in the House [supporting a reform], the fact that members are seeing that Donald Trump [goes] unchecked [on] FISA is a real threat to America. This gives us opportunities we've never had before," he says.
The FBI, in particular, has been expanding its warrantless data searches to American public officials and prominent political targets. A new report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent government agency, reveals that queries concerning political, religious, and media organizations or their prominent figures surged from 227 in 2024 to 839 in 2025. The board also found in 2021 that the FBI had conducted hundreds of searches on Black Lives Matter and Jan. 6 protesters while lacking "a proper justification."
FISA's power to conduct backdoor searches on American citizens has long angered lawmakers in both parties. Tulsi Gabbard, who now oversees the intelligence community, introduced a bill with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky in 2020, when she was a member of Congress, to stop warrantless searches on American citizens. The bill ultimately failed to pass the House.
Yet opposition in Washington has yielded only incremental reforms in the past few years, with measures that Wyden called "toothless." In 2024, Congress passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which bans backdoor searches conducted without a foreign intelligence purpose and adds training and approval requirements for FBI personnel running such searches. Two years after the bill's passage, a court found that the FBI is still violating RISAA by accessing Americans' messages through an advanced filtering tool that the Justice Department had previously shut down over privacy concerns.
"Overwhelmingly, the 2024 bill really didn't offer reforms with teeth and the chance to really change much of anything," Wyden says.
What is the FISA court?Following the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to oversee the government’s surveillance of foreign entities. Unlike regular state or federal courts, the FISA court operates in secret to protect national security, and the U.S. government is the only party present.
In the past, the FISA Court has secretly granted law enforcement unlimited authority to collect Americans’ information. As Edward Snowden revealed in 2013, the court approved a sweeping National Security Agency surveillance operation targeting Americans’ phone records, prompting Congress to reform the FISA Court by raising the bar for approving the FBI’s surveillance requests and adding oversight structures.
Even after the reform, the FISA Court remains opaque and deferential to the agencies it oversees. A transparency report shows that among the 287 applications submitted by law enforcement agencies in 2025, four were fully denied. The Director of National Intelligence, which has the power to declassify FISA Court opinions, only released three court opinions in total in 2025.
According to Wyden, who has reviewed a classified court decision raising concerns about the FBI’s interpretation of FISA’s authority, the responsibility for achieving genuine reform of FISA’s authority rests with Congress rather than the FISA Court.
“It's very evident that the FISA court of their own volition is not going to take the steps that we are talking about here,” Wyden says. “They're not going to crack down on backdoor searches and the loopholes that we're describing here.”
The data broker loophole lawmakers want to closeLawmakers are also trying to use any vote on FISA reform to stop the federal government from purchasing American data from private data brokers—companies that collect and sell publicly available data from social media and government websites.
A 2018 Supreme Court ruling requires law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant before accessing Americans' location data stored on cell phones, but as private entities, data brokers are not subject to the rules outlined by the Fourth Amendment, and they collect and sell Americans' location data to law enforcement and the intelligence community, often without users' consent.
Other law enforcement agencies have also purchased Americans' data and used AI software to track the specific locations of their targets. Multiple outlets reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used commercially available location data through a program called Webloc to search and track any phone's location on a map-style interface.
Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology's Security and Surveillance Project, says Congress tried to address the practice with the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which prohibited the National Security Agency from bulk collection of U.S. telephone data from all U.S. carriers following the Edward Snowden revelations. But it still continues through the use of private companies.
“That's exactly what Congress, in this FISA reform debate, previously said that they wanted to take off the table," he says.
Why did Trump reverse course on FISA?Although lawmakers have shown clear interest in advancing policy reform by introducing several bipartisan bills to ban warrantless searches of Americans, the politics of getting them across the finish line are much murkier. President Trump, who has advocated for killing FISA after claiming it was used to spy on his 2016 presidential campaign, said on Truth Social last month that he supports a clean extension of Section 702 of FISA.
But the White House's push for a clean extension was met with political headwinds in Congress, as 20 Republicans voted on April 17 against extending FISA's powers for five years. The failed vote forced House Speaker Mike Johnson to find a "bipartisan" pathway to grant a longer FISA extension with help from House Democrats, POLITICO reported.
In a statement to TIME, a White House official said the administration has "always recognized this is a difficult issue to reach consensus on and we remain optimistic about a path forward."
As the clock is ticking on FISA’s deadline, congressional leadership is seeking to find common ground with libertarian-leaning Republicans. On Friday, Speaker Johnson unveiled a new FISA bill that would extend Section 702’s authority by three years. The new bill would require the FBI to conduct a monthly review of its surveillance on American citizens, but it stopped short of asking the bureau to obtain a warrant.
In a letter to Congress, a group of 44 former intelligence officials urged a re-authorization of FISA, while disputing that the data broker loophole was FISA’s problem to begin with.
“There was no loophole left open to be later closed. That is because a prohibition on data broker acquisitions would be a separate regulatory matter with distinct legal and policy implications, entirely removed from the scope of FISA,” the letter reads.
"It looks like the individuals who are for the status quo, they're now getting rattled about the fact that we're generating all this support," Wyden says. "Usually, what they do is absolutely nothing until the last minute. And then at the last minute they say, 'Oh my goodness, if we don't get this passed just the way it is, Western civilization is going to end.' And they basically use that threat to get what they want. Now it's not working for them."
Wyden adds that, unlike the last authorization bill in 2024, which passed with the support of a majority of congressional Democrats, lawmakers on the left are growing wary of the surveillance powers the Trump administration has to crack down on protesters.
“When the government declassifies what I have been concerned about for years, I believe the American people are going to be stunned…that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with inadequate information,” he says.