The Senate has passed a bill reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial program that allows warrantless spying on foreign “targets,” but a long, knock-down, drag-out fight over amendments kept the Senate in session past midnight on Friday, when the surveillance program officially expired.
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Controversial US surveillance program (briefly?) lapses amid congressional dysfunction
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25386604/STK471_Government_Surveillance_CVirginia_B.jpg?ssl=1 "Controversial US surveillance program (briefly?) lapses amid congressional dysfunction")
To be clear, the spying wasn’t actually going to stop. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-OH) pointed out on the Senate floor on Friday afternoon, the FISA court recently granted a government request to allow the program to continue until April 2025.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) claimed that the FISA court’s extension of Section 702 certification “doesn’t mean the program can continue uninterrupted for another year.”
“In the event of a lapse,” Cornyn continued, “tonight at midnight, some communication service providers will stop cooperating with the United States government. That’s exactly what happened in 2008 when the predecessor of 702, called the Protect America Act, lapsed.”
“Allowing 702 to expire would be ‘an act of unilateral disarmament in the face of the Chinese Communist Party’”
Cornyn was keen on the importance of the FISA spying program, saying, “FBI Director Chris Wray said allowing 702 to expire would be, quote, an act of unilateral disarmament in the face of the Chinese Communist Party, close quote. So the stakes are extremely high.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) also stressed the urgency of reauthorizing of Section 702, claiming that “sixty percent” of the president’s daily brief comes from material collected through the surveillance program.
Less than three hours before Section 702’s expiration, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a version of the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act as an amendment to the reauthorization bill. (It ultimately failed 31-61.) Paul was clearly frustrated at other senators’ comments that it was too late to add new amendments to the bill.
“The idea that we don’t have enough time is a specious one,” Paul said. “The only reason we don’t have time is because the supporters of this bill delayed it to the last hour. We’ve had five years to renew this!” In his colleagues’ defense, the House had three failed votes on Section 702 before it was finally able to send its bill to the other chamber, leaving the Senate with barely a few days before the FISA sunset for its own proceedings.
“The House is still here,” Paul pointed out. “They’re going to be voting tomorrow. We should pass the good amendments today, send them to the House tomorrow.”
The House is scheduled to be in session on Saturday to vote on aid packages and a potential TikTok ban.
With two hours to go before Section 702’s expiration, the so-called act of unilateral disarmament in the face of the Chinese Communist Party, the senators then took a five-minute interlude to congratulate Susan Collins for making her 9000th roll call vote. “Day after day, year after year, our senior-most appropriator has demonstrated, through her dedication: do your homework, show up to vote on everything, on time,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before
Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced an amendment that would have struck language in the House bill that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider.” Under the House’s new provision, anyone “who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.” The expansion, Wyden has claimed, would force “ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying.” The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed 34-58, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before.
Both Sens. Paul and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements on surveilling Americans. A similar amendment failed in the House on a 212-212 vote. Durbin’s narrower warrant requirement wouldn’t require intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to query for those communications, though it requires one to access them.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) objected to a warrant requirement for Americans’ communications on the basis that many terrorists — like the 2015 San Bernardino shooters or the Boston Marathon bombers — are American. “If we had suspected them of terrorism and —” he began to say, before he caught himself, and then corrected himself, “none of these were prevented, but if these cases emerged today and we suspected them of terrorism, under this amendment you would not be able to surveil them to prevent a terrorist attack.”
Paul’s warrant requirement amendment failed 11-82, Durbin’s amendment failed 42-50.
Lee introduced an amendment would expand the role amicus curiae briefs play in FISA court proceedings. At this point, with about half an hour until midnight and the official expiration of Section 720, senators were visibly flagging.
Rubio began to give his objection to the amendment, but Warner interjected and took over, saying, “If we can get this and pass the bill before noon — before midnight — we can meet our goal, and I commit to work with all to make sure that we can continue to review the amicus proceedings in the next intel authorization bill.” Earlier in the day, Warner told his colleagues that the reauthorization is for “a mere two years,” so they might as well pass it.
Lee’s amendment failed 40-53.
“Mr. President, in the nick of time, bipartisanship has prevailed here in the Senate,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, as the final amendment was defeated. “We are reauthorizing FISA, right before it expires at midnight — twenty minutes before midnight. All day long, we persisted and persisted and persisted in trying to reach a breakthrough, and in the end we have succeeded and we are getting FISA done.”
The Senate commenced voting on the reauthorization bill with fifteen minutes to midnight, clearing a 60 vote threshold at about midnight. As of writing, the Senate still has not officially adjourned.
The bill is now headed to the president. If signed into law, the Section 702 surveillance program will expire in 2026, upon which we will have to do this all over again.
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When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn’t initially know what to believe. “There’s a lot of misinformation about data centers,” she said. “Google has denied taking that land.”
Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state border, sought to reclaim that land, “and Google is just a big, unnamed power user.” The city had in fact asked for ownership of a 150-acre portion of Mount Hood National Forest, claiming it needs access to Mount Hood’s watershed to meet municipal needs as its population — 16,010 as of the 2020 census — grows. But critics, including environmentalists, say the city is trying to secure more water for Google, which has a sprawling data center campus in The Dalles that already consumes about one-third of the city’s water supply.
This controversy made Reksopuro curious about the backlash to data centers being built in other communities. So Reksopuro, a student at the University of Washington who studies the connections between tech and public policy, decided to map it out. Using information collected by Epoch AI and data scraped from legislation on data centers, she built an interactive map tracking AI policy around the world. She designed it to be simple enough for anyone to use. “I wanted it to be something that my younger sisters could play through and explore to understand what are the data centers in the area and what’s actually being done about it,” Reksopuro said. She hoped to shift their opinions that way, “instead of like, through TikTok.”
Four times a day, the map searches for new sources and checks them against the existing database Reksopuro built out. “Once it does that, it will write a new summary, add it to the news feed, and populate it on the sidebar,” she said. “I wanted it to be self-updating, since I’m also a student.”
Reksopuro isn’t against data centers, but she thinks tech giants benefit from a lack of transparency around data center policies. “Right now, it’s this really opaque thing — and all of a sudden, there’s a facility,” she said. “I think that if people knew about data centers beforehand, it would give them leverage. They would be able to negotiate: ask for job training programs, tax revenue, environmental monitoring, things to improve their community.”
UCF commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield (University of Central Florida via Storyful)
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ROAD HAZARD: Waymo is issuing a sweeping recall of its autonomous vehicle fleet following a concerning incident that highlighted significant safety issues with the self-driving technology. Fox News Digital reporting outlines the specifics of the recall, the nature of the safety flaw, and what this setback means for the future of fully autonomous transportation on public roads.
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Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more.
In its announcement, Microsoft says you can “select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don’t.” The company is retiring Copilot Mode as well, which could similarly draw information from your tabs but offered some agentic features, like the ability to book a reservation on your behalf. Microsoft has since folded these agentic capabilities into its “Browse with Copilot” tool.
Several other AI features are coming to Edge, including an AI-powered “Study and Learn” mode that can turn the article you’re looking at into a study session or interactive quiz. There’s a new tool that turns your tabs into AI-powered podcasts as well, similar to what you’d find on NotebookLM, and an AI writing assistant that will pop up when you start entering text on a webpage.
You can also give Copilot permission to access your browsing history to provide more “relevant, high-quality answers,” according to Microsoft. Copilot in Edge on desktop and mobile will come with “long-term memory” as well, which can tailor its responses based on your previous conversations. And, when you open up a new tab, you’ll see a redesigned page that combines chat, search, and web navigation, along with the Journeys feature, which uses AI to organize your browsing history into categories that you can revisit.
Meanwhile, an update to Edge’s mobile app will allow you to share your screen with Copilot and talk through the questions about what you’re seeing. Microsoft says you’ll see “clear visual cues” when Copilot is active, “so you know when it’s taking an action, helping, listening, or viewing.”
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