Thread by @JameelJaffer

I don’t think Americans understand the extent to which the “foreign-intelligence exception” has hollowed out the Fourth Amendment. Most reporting about the current legislative debate is technical and incremental, and misses the forest for the trees. 1/

Here’s what's crucial: What was once an extremely narrow exception to ordinary constitutional principles has become, over time, a justification for warrantless surveillance on a staggering scale—not just of foreigners’ communications but of Americans’ communications too. 2/

With respect to Americans’ international communications, the Fourth Amendment has been made essentially a dead letter. 3/

Intelligence officials have obscured this, quite intentionally, over the course of multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican. 4/

Since the @Snowden disclosures, the line has been that Americans don’t need to worry about this surveillance because the NSA’s activities are targeted at foreigners abroad, and any collection of Americans’ communications is incidental or inadvertent. 5/

But every part of this sentence is misleading, because intel officials have accorded unusual definitions to all of the important words in it. /6

Brett Kaufman and I wrote about this ten years ago, when I was still at the @ACLU. Unfortunately what we wrote still holds true today. 7/ slate.com/news-and-polit…

The principal point of the 2008 amendments to FISA was to allow the NSA to collect *Americans’* communications—which is what the NSA’s director said to Congress, in a moment of unusual candor. 8/ aclu.org/files/assets/a…

And so at some level it’s not a surprise that we now find ourselves here. 9/

(That’s from this very good piece by the @ACLU’s Kia Hamadanchy and @ashgorski.) 10/ defenseone.com/ideas/2023/12/…

The vital context for the current legislative debate is that successive administrations—with the help of legislators and the indifference of the courts—have already used the foreign-intelligence exception to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment. 11/

Americans aren’t going to understand the significance of the technical debate over the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act unless journalists who cover this stuff make clearer what’s really going on. 12/

Sad, predictable update:

https://x.com/LizaGoitein/status/1735338926414455270?s=20