Without intervention by Congress, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 will expire at the end of this year. The White House is pushing hard for renewal, of course, but an odd bipartisan coalition in Congress is holding up the process and demanding changes first. They particularly object to elements of Section 702 that have frequently been abused by the FBI and the intelligence community to collect information on American citizens without a warrant. That’s a completely valid complaint, but nobody in Congress has put forward a coherent plan to change the law and provide additional protections for citizens in that manner while still being acceptable to the administration. But the clock is ticking and Congress already has a lot of work to get done.

With just seven weeks until the end of the year, the Biden administration is running out of time to win the reauthorization of a spy program it says is vital to preventing terrorism, catching spies and disrupting cyberattacks.

The tool, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, will expire at the end of December unless the White House and Congress can cut a deal and resolve an unusually vexing debate that has yielded unlikely alliances at the intersection of privacy and national security.

Without the program, administration officials warn, the government won’t be able to collect crucial intelligence overseas. But civil liberties advocates from across the political spectrum say the law as it stands now infringes on the privacy of ordinary Americans and insist that changes are needed before the program is reauthorized.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden released a bill this month (with the support of some Republicans) that would address the concerns being raised, at least in theory. His bill would require a warrant to access the communications of all citizens inside the United States except in cases where an immediate threat needed to be stopped or if the subject consented to the search. You wouldn’t think such a requirement would be objectionable since that’s pretty much the definition of the original goals of FISA. But an official for the Biden administration said that the warrant requirement “crossed a red line” and would be “unworkable.”

FISA has allowed the government to amass a huge database of private information about citizens and the FBI has been caught searching that database hundreds of thousands of times without obtaining a warrant. They keep adding to the collection by making bulk purchases of data from online data vendors. That’s bad enough to begin with, but just because happen to have someone’s data, that’s not an open invitation for the Justice Department to go trawling through it and using it against people without following due process.

Keep in mind the original name of the legislation in question. It’s the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was never intended to allow the surveillance of American citizens at home unless they were in contact with foreign entities. And when such information is sought, the government should always obtain a warrant. How and why is this controversial in any fashion?

I’m honestly getting the impression that the government has just gotten so used to doing whatever they feel like that they’re just taking it for granted that they will get whatever they ask for and no questions should be raised. But the FBI has used the FISA database to track down hundreds of people suspected of being involved in the January 6 riot, many of whom have no doubt had zero contacts with foreign actors. Nobody should be surprised if they’ve been trawling the data of “traditional Catholics” and parents who run for school board positions around the country.

I will agree that having FISA in place is important when it’s being used correctly. We should be able to keep tabs on potentially hostile foreign actors who may be plotting against us. But Section 702 can clearly be amended to make it clear that the Justice Department needs to keep its fingers out of the cookie jar when dealing with American citizens at home. And when they’re caught “mistakenly” searching the data, people need to be held accountable made to be an example to others.