Opinion | How to Fix Section 702 Surveillance

Congress is still debating how to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and doing it right has never been more important. The risk of terrorism has gone up since Hamas’s massacre in Israel, and the U.S. needs all the intel it can get to detect and prevent future attacks on the American homeland.

Section 702 lets the government monitor non-U.S. citizens outside the U.S. to protect national security. The information collected goes into a database that can later be searched by law enforcement. But the authority has come under scrutiny after abuses by some Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who ran searches related to Black Lives Matter protesters and even Members of Congress. Lawmakers want to reauthorize the program while protecting civil liberties, but some proposals are better than others.