Conservatives who haven’t given up on slashing the scope of the wiretapping authority are already strategizing about how to win the next battle in two years.
Rep. Jim Jordan predicts a Donald Trump victory in November would set the stage for “real reform” of the Section 702 program. | Francis Chung/POLITICOThe intelligence community and its allies in Congress waged an all-out battle to preserve a contentious government spy power — and they won, fending off a conservative-liberal coalition that demanded a dramatic overhaul.
No matter who wins the White House, the enduring push to revisit the spy power amounts to a warning for intelligence agencies that helped the Biden administration lobby hard to reauthorize the program.
Privacy advocates, for their part, are betting that the FBI won’t have a blemish-free surveillance record by the time the next fight starts to get underway next year. They spent months, on and off the Hill, building alliances to scrutinize government surveillance, gaining new supporters and getting the closest they have come to a win. They are predicting their ranks will grow.
“Because the truth is, you know, Turner and I and many others worked hard, but we had a lot of air cover from the administration. … If the administration weren’t to provide that air cover, we could have a problem,” he added. It wasn’t the first time Trump has muddled a surveillance fight on the Hill. He helped upend three unrelated surveillance programs in 2020, all of which ultimately expired, as he back-channeled with GOP privacy hawks. That dynamic is almost all but guaranteed to return if Trump is back in the White House; not to mention that he’s close with some of the loudest proponents of overhauling Section 702, like Jordan.
Those frustrated House Republicans, largely conservatives, believe he put his thumb on the scale against the type of sweeping changes backed by a bipartisan coalition at multiple points, including opposing the warrant requirement, keeping a separate data broker amendment out of the floor debate and generally aligning himself more closely with the Intelligence Committee over his former committee colleagues on the Judiciary panel.
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