US Lawmakers Move to Kill the FBI’s Warrantless Wiretap Access
A bipartisan private life The coalition in the U.S. Congress introduced a bill Thursday that would impose a strict warrant requirement for clandestine searches of U.S. communications by the FBI, aligning federal law with a 2025 federal court ruling that found the warrantless practice unconstitutional.
The bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2026, repeals controversial expansions of the government’s warrantless wiretapping power while overhauling key aspects of federal surveillance law, setting up a showdown with the U.S. intelligence community and its congressional allies weeks before a massive global spying program ends on April 20.
Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Lee are leading the legislative campaign alongside Representatives Warren Davidson and Zoe Lofgren. The measure has support from civil liberties organizations across the political spectrum.
The legislation comes amid a surveillance landscape fundamentally changed since 2024, when Congress last renewed the wiretap program, authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The bill’s sponsors touted the Government Oversight Reform Act as a necessary fix to a surveillance state that has been supercharged by modern technology and bureaucratic mission creep. Wyden noted that the explosion of commercially available data and rapid advances in AI have “far outpaced laws protecting Americans’ privacy.”
Davidson echoed this sentiment, arguing that Section 702 has been expanded “far beyond its original purpose” to allow unconstitutional searches of the country.
Section 702 authorizes the federal government to collect communications from aliens outside the United States without a warrant. In practice, the program scans large quantities of communications belonging to US citizens, permanent residents and others on US soil.
The FBI routinely sifts through this intercepted data to read Americans’ private messages without a warrant, a practice privacy advocates call a “backdoor search.”
In a speech earlier this week, Wyden warned that Congress was debating reauthorization without a full picture of government operations. “There is another example of secret law related to Section 702, which directly affects Americans’ privacy rights,” he said, noting that successive administrations have refused to declassify the matter. “When it is finally declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress debated this authority with sufficient information.”
The internal control mechanisms meant to check the government’s expansive powers have been systematically dismantled over the past year. FBI Director Kash Patel, who had previously criticized warrantless searches, reversed the issue after taking office. He now defends the program as a “critical tool”.
In May 2025, Patel closed the FBI’s Office of Internal Audit, the compliance unit that helped reduce inappropriate searches of U.S. data from more than 119,000 in 2022 to just 5,518 in 2024. The FBI heavily touted this improvement in compliance two years ago as its main argument for why a warrant requirement was not necessary.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard oversaw a similar process of eliminating independent watchdog agencies, including the mass firing of inspectors general and neutralization of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Council. Gabbard also faces a whistleblower complaint alleging she shared National Security Agency intercepts with the White House for political purposes.
The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This erasure of internal safeguards coincides with a broader deployment of repressive tools against national targets. Following a 2024 directive from former FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate urging agents to actively question Americans to substantiate the program’s existence, as first reported by WIRED, the current administration has raided journalists’ homes and issued a presidential memorandum redirecting counterterrorism resources to domestic political groups.
