In a lapse, not seen since 2008, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expired at midnight on June 12, 2026.
A House vote on a short-term reauthorization for FISA failed 218-198 on June 11th, a day before its expiration, blocked by House Democrats.
In a statement on why she voted against reauthorization, Rep. Alma Adams (D-NC) said her vote “reflects my concern about the potential abuse of surveillance powers for political purposes,” and cited that in 2022 the FBI had used Section 702 authority over 200,000 times to search through American data.
What is Section 702?
Section 702 authorizes U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreign individuals located outside of the U.S per the Brennan Center for Justice.
If a U.S. citizen communicates with a targeted foreign individual, that citizen’s side of the communication is also captured, and accessible without a warrant. It was most recently reauthorized in 2024 with an original sunset date of April 20, 2026. Congress spent the following months repeatedly passing short-term extensions to push that deadline back, until the June 11th vote finally failed to extend it any further.
Specifically, it is used to identify threat actors/networks, track terrorist organizations, weapons proliferation, cyberattacks, and everything under that umbrella.
Roughly 106,469 foreigners abroad were targeted under this authority, up from about 89,000 in 2013, per intelligence officials who briefed reporters on the matter.
The FBI’s usage of Section 702
Rep. Adams claimed the FBI had used Section 702 authority over 200,000 times to search through American data in 2022. Precisely, 200,000-204,000 “U.S. person queries” of Section 702 databases. That number however, actually represents a 93-94% decline from the prior year, when the FBI had conducted up to 3.4 million “U.S. person queries” in 2021.
The decline follows reforms within the FBI, requiring agents to affirmatively “opt-in” to running U.S. person queries against Section 702 data, rather than defaulting to running them. Per the Brennan Center’s analysis: the counting methodology changed again in 2023, when that reported number fell even further down to 57,094. That also reflects counting unique people searched rather than total comparison, so a direct year-over-year comparison isn’t precise.
So the 200,000 drop from 3.4 million, or 57,094 from 200,000, are low points of a steep, reform-driven decline.
One more question
The twist? Even though the law expired, the surveillance itself doesn’t stop. Section 702 doesn’t actually run directly off the law day-to-day, it runs off year-long approvals from a special court that oversees surveillance requests. Those approvals don’t expire just because the underlying law does; once granted, they stay valid until their own end date.
The FISA Court gave the greenlight to the current approval back in March 2026, per the Brennan Center for Justice, which means this surveillance is allowed to keep going all the way until March 2027, no matter what Congress decides to do, or not do, in the meantime.
