Lawmakers are leery that AI will give old-fashioned snooping a dangerous new edge.
The long-running fight to rein in the government’s power to search Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages without a warrant has gained new urgency on Capitol Hill over concerns that AI will supercharge state surveillance.
Lawmakers are currently jockeying over reforms to a key law that enables warrantless monitoring of Americans’ communications, with privacy advocates and national security hawks warning that AI will allow faster and more invasive analysis of vast amounts of information — including communications swept up in foreign intelligence programs and commercially available location or behavioral data.
“Imagine instead of doing a query with one person that you turned AI loose on these databases,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said Thursday at a press conference announcing a new bill to close data-collection loopholes. “There’s virtually nothing the government can’t know about you.”
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows the government to collect the communications of foreigners abroad, but it also enables the government to collect messages, emails and other transmissions from Americans when they contact foreigners. The government can then perform warrantless searches on those emails, messages and other communications. Though the provision was originally passed in 2008, lawmakers must renew it every few years.
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has emerged in recent weeks to tackle concerns about AI’s ability to search through the mountains of data procured through Section 702. In March, Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, and co-sponsors in the House and Senate introduced a sweeping FISA reform bill.
“For years, there have been jaw-dropping abuses of section 702,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a co-sponsor of the Government Surveillance Reform Act, said on the Senate floor last week. “Government officials have searched through 702 data to find Black Lives Matter protesters, political campaign donors, elected officials, even a state judge who complained about police abuses.”
America’s law enforcement agencies should be able to harness technology responsibly, Wyden said, “but new tools require new rules. Without new rules, you can count on the executive branch to run roughshod over Americans’ privacy rights and constitutional freedoms.”
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