{"id":23918,"date":"2026-05-01T02:55:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T02:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/23918\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T02:55:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T02:55:26","slug":"ai-is-supercharging-the-surveillance-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/23918\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Is Supercharging the Surveillance State"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a lot of help<\/a> from his Democratic friends, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to pass a three-year extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) early Wednesday evening. But the only way he could appease Republican hard-liners was by attaching a ban on central bank digital currencies, a pro-crypto rallying cry for Freedom Caucus types, to the bill. A CBDC ban will get almost universal opposition from Senate Democrats, and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has said the bill is doomed in his chamber.<\/p>\n

Thune is angling for a 45-day extension of the program to allow for more debate; it\u2019s unclear whether the House will allow that to pass. The underlying statute expires tonight.<\/p>\n

More from James Baratta<\/a><\/p>\n

The 702 program gives U.S. intelligence agencies the authority to collect communications data on foreign intelligence targets abroad. In practice, however, it has allowed those agencies to amass troves of data<\/a> on American citizens that can be accessed without a warrant. None of the so-called reforms greenlit by the House this week include meaningful Fourth Amendment protections, as many privacy and civil liberties advocates in both parties were calling for.<\/p>\n

Ahead of Wednesday\u2019s vote, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, once again<\/a> whipped his Democratic colleagues into willfully refusing to resolve the issue of warrantless searches, according to emails seen by the Prospect. Members of the ranking member\u2019s staff emailed legislative directors for House Democrats on Wednesday afternoon, recommending they vote in favor of the extension.<\/p>\n

Himes and these 41 Democrats joined 192 Republicans in voting for the three-year extension: Jared Golden (D-ME), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Pete Aguilar (D-CA), Laura Gillen (D-NY), Gil Cisneros (D-CA), Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), Susie Lee (D-NV), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Marilyn Strickland (D-WA), Ami Bera (D-CA), Herb Conaway (D-NJ), Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI), Josh Riley (D-NY), Sanford Bishop (D-GA), Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Josh Harder (D-CA), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), Brad Schneider (D-IL), Derek Tran (D-CA), Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), Don Davis (D-NC), Frank Mrvan (D-IN), Kim Schrier (D-WA), Gabe Vasquez (D-NM), Janelle Bynum (D-OR), Lois Frankel (D-FL), Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Terri Sewell (D-AL), Marc Veasey (D-TX), Ed Case (D-HI), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Eric Sorensen (D-IL), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), Kathy Castor (D-FL), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Scott Peters (D-CA), Darren Soto (D-FL), and George Whitesides (D-CA). Their combined voting power was enough to overcome the 22 House Republicans who defected from their party to reject Section 702 reauthorization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no way to replace the value that Section 702 provides, and the loss of this authority would be devastating,\u201d said Himes, \u201cso given the binary choice between reauthorization and expiration, the responsible choice is reauthorization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today On TAP<\/p>\n

This story first appeared in our free Today On TAP newsletter, a weekday email featuring commentary on the daily news from Robert Kuttner and Harold Meyerson.<\/p>\n

While warrant requirements have dominated the ongoing debate over Section 702, Congress once again seems to be a step behind the technological curve. That could prove costly, as \u201cthe government could use AI to process huge amounts of disparate data to identify Americans for warrantless searches,\u201d Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said on the Senate floor earlier this week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese technological advances are happening very fast, and Congress needs to step up and protect Americans,\u201d he said. \u201cNew tools require new rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Thursday and in conjunction with a temporary extension of the program, Wyden proposed declassifying the opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which has recertified Section 702 through next year, meaning searches may be able to continue even if the statute expired, though there would likely be litigation.<\/p>\n

Declassification is already required by law. Wyden is simply proposing \u201cthat the opinion be declassified now before Congress votes on renewing Section 702,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The demand for declassification prompted a thinly veiled threat<\/a> from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who said in response to Wyden: \u201cOne of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I\u2019m the chairman of this committee.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, Himes has suggested that the 702 program \u201cis not a dragnet\u201d and \u201cnot an authority that can be used to surveil Americans.\u201d He also downplayed the potential use of AI analysis. \u201c[The 702 database] does not contain any commercially acquired information, and it does not use artificial intelligence to analyze collected data.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Patrick Eddington, senior fellow in homeland security and civil liberties at the Cato Institute, FISA authorities like the NSA engage in what is known as \u201cupstream collection,\u201d where the government acquires communications data by tapping directly into telecommunications infrastructure. Intelligence agencies also separately acquire commercially available data through downstream collection. Between the two methods, it is perhaps inevitable that Americans\u2019 private communications are swept up in this surveillance dragnet.<\/p>\n

Contrary to what Himes has claimed, the 702 program has been used<\/a> to target Americans, including activists<\/a>, journalists, government officials, and even exes<\/a>. What happens when an AI agent is tasked with searching for U.S. person information?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s something that can be done in a matter of seconds,\u201d Eddington told the Prospect. \u201cAI could provide a massive shortcut to be able to take a look at lots of people in a much [shorter] period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, if the data itself contains system errors, \u201cthat\u2019s going to get carried all the way through to the end,\u201d he said, \u201cand of course, we\u2019ve already seen this with some other surveillance programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eddington pointed to the U.S. Terrorist Watchlist, which is managed by the FBI\u2019s Terrorist Screening Center and has been criticized for identifying hundreds of thousands of people, including American citizens, as terrorism suspects based on broad, often opaque standards<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Congress is still trying to solve a problem that National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed more than a decade ago: warrantless searches<\/a>. \u201cAs is so often the case with Congress and technology issues, Congress is lagging behind in its response to [AI],\u201d Eddington said.<\/p>\n

For Wyden, it\u2019s past time to implement warrant requirements, and Congress must rise to the occasion and rein in AI-driven surveillance before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

As NBC News reported<\/a>, Wyden sent a letter to the nation\u2019s top AI companies late last month asking whether they would consent to the federal government using their technology to surveil Americans. Anthropic responded that the company\u2019s usage policy prohibits users from engaging in \u201cunauthorized surveillance or tracking of individuals,\u201d but noted that the company had granted an exception to \u201ca small number of national-security customers, permitting the use of our models for foreign intelligence analysis in accordance with applicable law.\u201d Anthropic acknowledged that foreign intelligence information may include \u201cincidentally collected U.S.-person information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Anthropic and Google emphasized the need to safeguard individuals\u2019 privacy and constitutional rights. OpenAI and xAI, owned by Elon Musk, did not respond to Wyden\u2019s letter at all.<\/p>\n

Wyden\u2019s Government Surveillance Reform Act would prevent warrantless backdoor searches of U.S. citizen communications, and stop intelligence agencies from purchasing commercially available data without a warrant. The bipartisan legislation<\/a> would also establish guardrails around AI in government surveillance by requiring intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant before accessing Americans\u2019 location information, web browsing data, and related records.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI has everything to do with how we think about surveillance in this country,\u201d said Donald Bell, policy counsel at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). \u201cNow is definitely the time for Congress to be thinking about how artificial intelligence can be abused, and what protections need to be put in place right now to ensure \u2026 protections for Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a lot of help from his Democratic friends, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to pass a three-year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,53,25,1069,1670,3277,10007,16339,132,206,16340,1896,7114,16341,157,464,16342,2899],"class_list":{"0":"post-23918","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-big-tech","12":"tag-congress","13":"tag-cryptocurrency","14":"tag-digital-privacy","15":"tag-fisa","16":"tag-google","17":"tag-intelligence","18":"tag-jim-himes","19":"tag-national-security","20":"tag-nsa","21":"tag-on-tap","22":"tag-openai","23":"tag-politics","24":"tag-ron-wyden","25":"tag-xai"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}