As U.S. lawmakers debate the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire at the end of this year, the IPI global network expresses profound concerns about the statute’s risks for journalists, and calls on Congress to enact serious reforms to Section 702 that address those risks before any decision on reauthorization takes place.

Section 702, which was added as an amendment to FISA in 2008, empowers the U.S. intelligence community to surveil and monitor non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located abroad with the purpose of gathering “foreign intelligence information”.

The statute explicitly prohibits the targeting of U.S. persons, who are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Yet despite this safeguard, the U.S. intelligence community acknowledges that the data and overseas communications of this excluded group — including their calls, emails and texts — may be collected in connection to surveillance of foreign actors. This data can then be queried and accessed by American intelligence agencies without a court-ordered warrant, in what critics have called “backdoor searches”.

The implications of this controversial statute for media workers are serious. “In principle and in practice there is a lot of reason to fear that Section 702, as it operates now, is going to intrude on reporters’ confidential contacts with their sources”, said Grayson...

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