The FBI should get a warrant before reading your messages

Conservatives have spent decades fighting government overreach. We have opposed IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, regulatory power-grabs, and agencies that treat the Bill of Rights as a suggestion. So explain this: Why are Republican leaders in Congress lining up to renew a surveillance law that lets the FBI read Americans' private communications without asking a judge? Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on April 30. Intelligence agencies want an 18-month clean extension — no changes, no reforms, no warrant requirement. The intelligence community has joined former Biden administration officials in making the rounds on Capitol Hill, pressing members of Congress to fall in line.

Some of us are standing up for the Fourth Amendment by demanding, at the very least, fair votes on real civil liberties protections. Some are not, demanding that we shut up and not only reauthorize this powerful spying power, but also deny Americans a chance to see how their representatives in Congress vote on an issue that enjoys overwhelming, bipartisan support from their constituents.

Conservatives who believe January 6 defendants were treated unjustly by a politicized Department of Justice should be the first to demand a warrant requirement — because Section 702 is one of the laws that was wrongly used to go after those Americans.

Here's what a "clean" reauthorization actually means. The government collects the communications of foreign targets overseas — emails, texts, calls. That part is unobjectionable. Foreigners have no Fourth Amendment rights. The problem is what happens next. When those foreign targets communicate with Americans, those American messages get swept into the database too — hundreds of millions of them. And then the FBI can search through those communications using your name or email address — with no warrant, no judge, and no probable cause. This is the "backdoor search." This is not a hypothetical concern. In a single reporting period, the government conducted 278,000 searches that violated the rules. From 2018 to 2024, federal law required a warrant before the FBI could conduct backdoor searches in certain criminal cases. The bureau ran dozens of qualifying searches during that window. It obtained the required court order zero times.

Conservatives who believe January 6 defendants were treated unjustly by a politicized Department of Justice should be the first to demand a warrant requirement — because Section 702 is one of the laws that was wrongly used to go after those Americans.

RELATED: GOP hard-liners derail government's spying power despite pressure from Trump

cbies/Getty Images

Congress responded in 2024 by passing minor reforms that mostly codified then-current practice — RISAA — which is to say Congress put into law the same rules that had already led to significant misuse. The FBI's response was to quietly use a separate querying tool that bypassed those requirements. By March 2026, the FISA Court issued a classified opinion that found the issue spanned the entire intelligence community. And it isn’t just the FBI. We still don’t know whether the NSA analyst who searched Section 702 data for information about online dating matches kept his security clearance or job.

The fix is straightforward. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) has introduced the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, while Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), and a bipartisan coalition have introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act, both of which require a warrant before the FBI can access an American's private communications collected under Section 702. Conservative members blocked the clean reauthorization not to make FISA reauthorization impossible, but to create a path forward for a version that does not unjustly violate Americans’ privacy.

The argument that we must choose between national security and the warrant requirement is false. Warrants do not prevent surveillance. They require the government to convince a judge that the surveillance is justified, as the Constitution requires. Government agencies that cannot meet that standard are fishing — for you.