At Hearing on FISA, Democrats and Republicans Agree on Urgent Need for Reforms to Protect Americans’ Privacy Rights and Civil Libertie

Washington, D.C. (December 11, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, led Committee Democrats in examining how more protections are needed to ensure Americans’ privacy against unlawful government searches.

The hearing included testimony from: Elizabeth Goitein, Senior Director, Liberty & National Security, Brennan Center; Gene Schaerr, General Counsel, Project for Privacy & Surveillance Accountability; James Czerniawski, Head of Emerging Technology Policy, Consumer Choice Center; and Brett Tolman, Executive Director, Right on Crime. 

With the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 expiring next April, Congress must implement significant reforms and safeguards to protect Americans’ privacy rights and civil liberties against government abuse.

• Rep. Becca Balint broke down the basics of Section 702, “This is the thing that I want Americans outside of this Committee, outside of Congress, to understand. Is anyone vulnerable to this?” Ms. Goitein affirmed, “If you communicate with foreigners overseas, you are vulnerable.” Rep. Balint continued, “If you communicate with foreigners overseas, you are vulnerable to this backdoor search.” Ms. Goitein explained: “Yes. I mean, the government has to have a foreign intelligence purpose for the Section 702 program. But foreign intelligence is defined so broadly that it can include information that simply relates to the U.S. conduct of foreign affairs.” Rep. Balint replied: “So essentially, any person with an email account or a cell phone could potentially be a target of government surveillance by our government. And there’s no requirement that the government get an actual warrant to spy on our personal communications.”
   
• Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked: “Section 702 does not allow for the targeting of U.S. persons, and yet millions of Americans have been targeted for surveillance under this statute. Why is it important to protect everyone in the United States from warrantless surveillance?” Ms. Goitein explained: “First of all, as a constitutional matter, the Fourth Amendment protects everybody in this country. So, if you believe that a warrant requirement is a constitutional requirement—as a district court held a year ago, as a unanimous panel of the Second Circuit seemed to indicate in their earlier decision—then it applies to everyone in this country. But there are practical reasons as well. Just as collection of the communications of non-U.S. persons incidentally pulls in U.S. person communications queries, any query can incidentally retrieve the communications of Americans.”
   
• Rep. Jayapal asked, “How would enacting a warrant requirement both protect Fourth Amendment rights while providing a clear process for the FBI to do its work?” Ms. Goitein replied: “The answer is to have the government get a warrant to put the burden of gatekeeping these searches where it belongs, which is with the courts. That would reduce the need for all of these layers of internal oversight and whatever sort of administrative paperwork and burden is associated with those layers. And it would also remove any motive that might exist for FBI agents to be excessively cautious. FBI agents would be free to do their job, to vigorously pursue investigations within the law and their professional obligations. And then the courts could do their job, the job that they do in pretty much every context except 702, which is to determine whether there is a lawful basis for this.”

Technological advancements have made it easier for the government and private companies to conduct surveillance and collect and access people’s private information.

• Ranking Member Raskin asked: “I’m troubled by the government’s contracts with Palantir to create software that allows the government to assemble and combine previously siloed information, in particular departments, with data purchased from data brokers. Could you explain to the committee how purchased data can be used to compile comprehensive profiles of American citizens?” Ms. Goitein explained: “If all these pieces of data are shared across the government and put together, it could be possible to build dossiers on Americans. That would give a startlingly complete picture of their private lives, their associations, their habits, their beliefs. This is information that our government in a free society should not have access to, unless there is a specific justification for a specific purpose.”
   
• Rep. Steve Cohen asked, “With AI, are we going to have more and more problems because there will be more and more data?” Ms. Goitein replied: “Absolutely. And I think with AI, we’re going to have to really reexamine how ‘U.S. person query’ is even defined because, if AI is used in a way that can select U.S. person communications without actually using what we think of as U.S. person identifiers, then we are sort of right back where we were before, with really no limits on governmental access to U.S. person communications.”

Donald Trump’s removal of guardrails put in place to protect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties raises new concerns about key government surveillance programs.

• Ranking Member Raskin said: “For years, the leaders of this Committee have warned of how executive branch surveillance powers could be abused by a president who didn’t care about protecting civil liberties, who used cutting-edge technology to spy on Americans, and who ignored basic principles of due process and constitutional freedom to achieve their own ends. In 2025, we no longer have to wonder if we were right to worry.”
   
• Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon said: “The importance of protecting Americans’ essential rights and privacy has never been more clear than in the past year, when we’ve seen the current Administration, with respect to its allies at DOGE and the Department of Justice, mobilize the government to invade and collect Americans private data, whether Social Security, tax, student loans, health care, voter registration, or SNAP data. And when you add that to the growing purchase of online and social media data by the government, we see that data being used in illegal law enforcement activities and even prosecutions of this Administration’s political enemies.”
   
• Rep. Deborah Ross said: “The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) serves an important oversight role, especially regarding FISA. The board has published numerous reports and recommendations about the different surveillance programs, and released a report in September of 2023 about Section 702 that contained multiple recommendations to protect the rights of Americans. But in January, almost immediately after he was sworn in as President, Trump fired the Democratic board members, and the board now has one part-time member and lacks a quorum to begin new investigations or issue reports signed by the Board.” Ms. Goitein highlighted PCLOB’s importance: “The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is the only independent agency within the government that is charged with ensuring the protection of Americans’ civil liberties. […] If you don’t have the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board doing its job, then all of the oversight that’s coming from the executive branch will effectively be internal oversight.”
   
• Rep. Hank Johnson said: “This President set up DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and put it in the hands of Elon Musk and then unleashed Elon Musk to collect the private data of citizens through capturing the data of the Social Security Administration, the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, Health and Human Services, the V.A., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation, and others. And the goal was to create a single centralized government database. And this effort was unprecedented and unauthorized by Congress.”
   
• Rep. Jasmine Crockett said: “The most important part of making reforms to government surveillance programs is ensuring that Americans’ privacy rights are not being violated, but that requires Congress to do its job and conduct oversight of these executive branch programs. […] We can talk for hours about legislative reforms needed for FISA. But none of it will matter if Republicans refuse to conduct actual oversight, or if they continue to allow the Administration to dismantle federal oversight offices and positions.”
   
• Rep. Joe Neguse explained: “To address, at least in part, some […] 702 abuses, Attorney General Bill Barr in 2020 directed the creation of an Office of Internal Auditing. […] That office, created by […] President Trump’s former Attorney General in the first term was designed to scrutinize the 702 process to prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the future.” In response to a question by Rep. Neguse on if this was a worthy goal, Republican witness Mr. Schaerr affirmed that it was. Yet, Mr. Shaerr was unaware that the office was eliminated by FBI Director Kash Patel earlier this year.