The House is set to vote on S. 139, a bill reauthorizing the law that allow for "backdoor" searches of Americans' communications, with the very confused support of Donald Trump. That authority, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is set to expire later this month. Section 702 is the basis for some of the NSA’s largest surveillance programs, and basically allows an end-run around the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Section 702 is important because it allows intelligence agencies to intercept electronic communications on U.S. territory for foreign intelligence purposes without prior approval of a court—a practice that had been outlawed for decades. Under that legal authority, the NSA scoops up international communications as they pass through large internet switches in the United States, and the FBI, on NSA’s behalf, collects email, chats, photos, documents, and other electronic data stored by U.S. companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
The "targets" of this kind of surveillance have to be foreign nationals. Even so, a lot of Americans—the NSA says it can't count how many—are also swept in. […] Section 702 allows intelligence agencies to choose their targets without disclosing or defending them in court. The FISC approves a set of rules and procedures once a year and the government promises to follow them. But the government does not have to tell a judge who it is spying on or why.
It "lets the NSA collect the contents of emails, personal photographs, spreadsheets, business documents, and video streams without a particularized warrant from a judge." All of that get sucked into a number of databases that can be searched and read by law enforcement—including the FBI—without a warrant. Which it does, so frequently in fact that they liken their trawling there to doing Google searches. The bill in the House today gives a nod toward closing the loophole, but a meaningless nod. It still lets law enforcement comb through all that data, and then get a warrant once they have enough information to launch a formal criminal investigation.
That's clearly not good enough. The passage of the bill isn't entirely clear even though they've brought it to the floor. Several Freedom Caucus members, including Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Thomas Massie (R-KY). Amash has an amendment, in fact, that would gut S. 139 and replace it with a good bill—the USA Rights Act. There might be enough Republican opposition to S. 139.
Right now is a good time to use this tool to call your House representative and tell them to vote against S. 139 unless the USA Rights Act amendment passes.