Congressional Black Caucus to Support Spying Powers Used on BLM Activists
This week, the Congressional Black Caucus will quietly support an effort to reauthorize surveillance powers that were used to spy on Black Lives Matter activists in 2020, the Prospect has learned. According to multiple congressional sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, CBC support for the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) comes after Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the powerful ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, successfully lobbied CBC leadership to stand down on reforming the vast intelligence authority.
Section 702 grants U.S. intelligence agencies the authority to collect communications data on foreign intelligence targets abroad. In practice, however, it has allowed those agencies to amass troves of data on American citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of many FISA authorities with warrantless access to Americans’ communications data, which the agency has been known to purchase from U.S.-based companies.
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Privacy advocates like the Brennan Center for Justice contend that the intelligence community’s efforts to reduce the number of U.S. person queries completed under Section 702 only reflect known searches, as the FBI has “neither tracked nor audited these queries as required by law.”
According to The New York Times, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) greenlit the 702 program’s annual recertification in a classified ruling last month. The decision permits FISA authorities to collect communications data through March 2027, regardless of whether Congress extends the statute underpinning Section 702, which is set to expire on April 20.
But the presiding judge also raised red flags in the ruling, according to the Times, communicating that there are serious problems with the way intelligence agencies use Section 702 tools to collect communications on American citizens. The judge, as part of the reauthorization, ordered changes to the way Section 702 data is filtered to produce intelligence on U.S. citizens.
The Prospect can report that on March 26, staff on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received notification of this red flag. In the following weeks, HPSCI staff briefed Democrats in both classified and unclassified settings on the necessity of reauthorizing Section 702. But during both briefings, HPSCI staffers failed to alert Democrats about the FISC’s concerns with collection of U.S. citizen data.
Despite the bipartisan push from many of his colleagues to reform Section 702 and to restrict spying powers now in the hands of Donald Trump, Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, has worked behind the scenes to encourage Democrats to support a clean reauthorization, while repeating the same hawkish talking points about the urgency of a clean reauthorization. In March, Meeks told The Hill that after speaking with Himes, he would support the clean reauthorization of 702. The Prospect contacted all members of the leadership of the CBC and Rep. Meeks to seek comment on the decision to support a clean reauthorization of Section 702. None of them responded before press time.
The decision by the CBC is just one example of the tremendous power the intelligence community has exerted year after year to renew surveillance powers it says are essential to national security. On Friday, the CIA disclosed that those powers not only played a role in foiling an ISIS-connected terror plot targeting a Taylor Swift concert in Austria in 2024, but also augmented Mexico’s operation against the late kingpin of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The eleventh-hour release follows a similar pattern from the 2024 fight to reauthorize Section 702, when the intelligence community briefed politicians on the threat of a Russian anti-satellite nuclear capability in the run-up to a vote on the authority.
So influential are the intelligence agencies that rely on Section 702 that they have managed to cow a long-standing reformist, CBC chairwoman Yvette Clarke (D-NY).
In 2010, Clarke opposed Section 702 on the grounds that renewal of the act would create “a precedent under which we will see the creation of a system that uses the private sector as a de facto spying agency for the government.” Since 2010, Clarke has consistently voted to pass broad reforms restricting Section 702’s reach, and voted against reauthorizing the power the last time it came before Congress in 2024.
In addition to Clarke’s long-standing opposition to Section 702, the CBC’s support of reauthorization is even more glaring given the FBI’s track record of using the authority to spy on Black Lives Matter activists. According to declassified records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in 2020 the FBI obtained communications from over 130 Black Lives Matter activists in a search using Section 702 data. At the time of the records release, the Bureau claimed it was a marginal oversight, telling reporters that it all boiled down to a “lack of understanding on the part of the person who ran it,” and that “ [the] person received remedial training as well.”
Despite the Bureau’s explanation, the FBI has maintained a long-standing practice of chilling dissent through the surveillance and criminalization of American activists, whether in the creation of a domestic threat category for “Black identity extremists” as recently as 2017, or its concerted efforts to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide at the height of the civil rights movement.
In 2022, the FISC also disclosed in an opinion that the FBI’s own policies were violated when FISA data was used by analysts to spy on a judge who had reported a civil rights violation from a police chief to the FBI, along with state and federal politicians.
These practices have led some in the Democratic caucus to marshal a challenge to the FBI’s surveillance “crown jewel.” Democrats like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have resisted keeping warrantless spying powers in the hands of the Trump administration. And both the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus have been circulating a letter seeking to block this week’s reauthorization vote. Notably absent is the sign-on of the CBC.
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