Letters to leaders call on greater privacy protections in FISA reauthorization
As Congress considers the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a broad coalition of 14 civil rights, privacy, and tech groups is urging Senate and House leaders to close surveillance loopholes as AI supercharges mass surveillance. In letters sent late last week, the coalition calls on Congress to include a warrant requirement for accessing Americans’ communications content and to fix the data broker loophole.
FISA Section 702 lets the government surveil foreign targets abroad, but it can also sweep Americans’ private communications, raising major privacy and civil liberties concerns as the government adopts new AI technologies that can analyze, aggregate, and weaponize sensitive data at an unprecedented scale.
Read the letters to the Senate and House Committee leaders
“Americans should not have to surrender their constitutional rights because surveillance tools have become faster, cheaper, and more powerful,” the coalition said in the letters. “If Congress fails to act now, AI will not just expand existing privacy violations, but will make them harder to detect, easier to scale, and far more dangerous to democracy.”
The letter was signed by Americans for Responsible Innovation, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Center for Democracy & Technology, Common Cause, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Demand Progress, Defending Rights & Dissent, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Free Press Action, National Action Network, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Restore The Fourth Action, TechEquity Action, and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Research shows that AI can compress into seconds what would take a human investigator hours. Through inference, pattern matching, and data fusion, AI-enabled re-identification can assemble granular portraits of individuals’ lives, making data analysis faster, cheaper, and potentially more invasive than ever before.
###