End warrantless spying now

The following remarks by Rep. Thomas Massie were made during Thursday’s select subcommittee hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

"Speaking of fixing things, I want to talk about the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Service Act) program, which, Mr. Baker, you’ve talked about in your testimony. Particularly the 702 part of it. Parts of it that we are going to reexamine and reauthorize potentially.

On the surface of it, it sounds like a practical, legal concept that you would collect information on foreign targets who don’t have constitutional rights, and you might incidentally collect information that pertains to U.S. citizens who do have constitutional rights.

But because it was collected incidentally, and not in pursuit of that U.S. person… oh, we’ll go look at this data. You know, we’ll put some policies and procedures, but the Constitution does not apply here because it was incidentally collected.

While surveilling foreign targets under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the US government collects exabytes of data pertaining to American citizens.

The Constitution requires a warrant to query that vast database for Americans. End warrantless spying now. pic.twitter.com/dpaCAx3Npp — Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) February 10, 2023

Well if the incidental collection were small enough that might be a valid concept. The problem is we’ve collected millions of exabytes of data. When what you’re collecting incidentally becomes the entire universe…

I think you might need a warrant to go look at that information.

And when the number of searches that is done on U.S. persons by the FBI - I’m not talking about CIA, NSA. We know in 2020 it was over a million searches into this fishing, into this database, where you don’t need a warrant.

Then in 2021 it want from a million to over three million searches.

This is problematic and I hope we look at this going forward."