IC Oversight & Authorities — 2026-05-09

Bipartisan SAFE Act Coalition Targets FISA 702 Warrant Requirement as AI Amplifies Surveillance Concerns

Congress passed a 45-day clean extension of Section 702 on April 30, setting a new deadline of June 12, after a House-passed three-year extension bill carrying an unrelated CBDC ban stalled in the Senate. Two bipartisan Senate bills would require warrants before agencies query Americans' communications and close the data broker loophole: the Lee-Durbin SAFE Act, introduced February 23, and the Lee-Wyden Government Surveillance Reform Act, introduced March 12. A declassified ODNI report found the FBI increased backdoor searches of Americans by 34 percent in 2025, to over 7,400. The FISA Court ruled in March 2026 that FBI compliance violations the DOJ said it had corrected remain ongoing and now extend beyond the FBI, according to The Dupree Report.

Analysis
The FISA Court's March 2026 finding that FBI compliance violations persist and extend beyond the FBI, unverified as the ruling remains classified, strips the intelligence community's self-correction argument while Patel's abolition of the FBI's internal auditing office forecloses the administrative remedy Congress has historically accepted in lieu of statutory reform. AI's capacity to assemble innocuous queries into aggregate dossiers gives reformers a structurally new argument: friction was the safeguard, not administration. A substantive bill past committee markup by December 31, 2026, is a roughly even chance. Coalition breadth is consistent with credit-claiming while leadership prevents a floor vote, which would explain the absence of scheduled markup in either Judiciary Committee despite the approaching deadline.

1 sources

AI Joins FISA: A Bipartisan Coalition Forms to Rein In a Supercharged Surveillance State - The Dupree Report