Electronic surveillance

Surveillance Battles: 2017 in Review

If you’ve been following EFF’s work, you’ll know that we’ve been fighting against the creeping surveillance state for over 20 years. Often, this means pushing back against the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance programs, but as new technology becomes available, new threats emerge.

Here are some of the biggest legislative fights we had in 2017.

FISA Section 702

Section 702 is a surveillance authority that is part of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. It was created as a way for the intelligence community to collect foreign intelligence from non-Americans located outside of the United States. However, the way the law is currently written allows the NSA to “incidentally” collect communications from an untold number of Americans. We say “untold” because the government has never disclosed how many law-abiding Americans have had their communications vacuumed up by the NSA and other intelligence gathering organizations. In addition to being used to prevent terrorism, Section 702 allows for that collected information to be used in ordinary law enforcement activities. As we have witnessed in several recent Congressional hearings, even members of Congress tasked with overseeing these programs literally don’t know how many Americans have been impacted by this program because the FBI, the DOJ, and the NSA have refused repeated requests share that information...