When the U.S. House passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, which reauthorizes the FISA Section 702 surveillance authority, it overlooked something big - an amendment that would drive the greatest expansion of government surveillance authority in recent history.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a legal authority enacted by Congress to enable the surveillance of foreign threats located abroad. But it has increasingly become a means of surveilling Americans located within the United States whose communications are often caught up in the government's global trawl of data.
In the House, reformers proposed an amendment to add a warrant requirement before the government can query a U.S. person's data.
As RISAA comes to the Senate, attention is now being cast on another amendment - one from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that many have come to call the "Everyone's a Spy" provision.
It would give the government the right to similarly compel millions of small businesses that provide Wi-Fi, or have access to routers or other ordinary communications equipment, to act as the government's partners in surveillance.
Small businesses are just waking up to what is about to be done to them by the Everyone's a Spy amendment.
The agencies have already secured permission from the FISA Court to continue conducting Section 702 surveillance in its current form until April 2025.
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