FISA “Reform”: The Surveillance Fear Mongering Campaign Ramps Up

The House GOP leadership must be at least somewhat worried about the prospects for passage of their Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA) Sec. 702 bill, HR 4478, which the House Rules Committee will consider later today in an "emergency" session.

I say this because this morning, the House GOP leadership circulated a wanted poster-style flyer of a dead man: Haji Iman, the alleged ISIS deputy finance minister and second in command to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed in eastern Syria on March 25, 2016. The flyer puts the phrase "ISIS" in a huge font, just in case the reader wasn't getting the message.

Claiming that "Iman would still be plotting to kill Americans without Section 702," the flyer then makes an interesting admission: that the search for Iman "was ultimately successful based almost exclusively on intelligence activities under Section 702" (emphasis added).

Not only does the flyer provide no proof that Iman was planning attacks on the United States, it omits the fact that both the Iraqi and U.S. governments had previously claimed repeatedly that Iman had been killed—six times, in fact.

As I've noted previously, two other major post-9/11 surveillance programs—the illegal STELLAR WIND mass surveillance program, and the PATRIOT Act's Sec. 215 telephone metadata collection program—failed to stop a single attack on America. If it took the NSA two years to find Iman using Section 702 "almost exclusively" after claiming repeatedly the man was dead, it should raise major questions about the veracity of the official government (and now House GOP leadership) account of this incident and the effectiveness of the Section 702 program.

And then there's that tantalizing phrase—"almost exclusively."

The flyer admits that programs besides Section 702 were responsible for finally—allegedly—killing Iman. So Section 702 collection was not, apparently, a "but for" capability (i.e., but for Section 702, Iman would still be alive). How effective is Secton 702? We don't know. There's never been an independent, case-by-case audit of claimed Section 702 "successes" during the nearly 10-year life of the program. And the bill being considered by the House Rules Committee today does not call for such an audit.

What the flyer also doesn't say is that as written, HR 4788 would effectively expand warrantless surveillance under Section 702, including potentially against purely domestic targets. Given the abuses of the Section 702 program that have been exposed over the past several years, HR 4478 is an amazing statement of the contempt the House GOP leadership has for the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.