Dear Mr. Kagan,
Thank you for contacting me about the potential reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). While I previously voted to reauthorize Section 702 under both the first term Trump and Biden administrations, I can no longer support reauthorization and would vote against cloture and passage of any bill seeking long-term reauthorization of Section 702 as-is or with only modest reforms.
Since 2024, several intervening developments, have, in combination, hollowed out the statutory safeguards on which my prior support for Section 702 reauthorization rested. There has been a comprehensive collapse of Executive Branch credibility at every node of the Section 702 certification chain. We are living in an unprecedented era where scores of Federal judges across the country are determining that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has repeatedly acted in bad faith and provided Federal Courts with inaccurate, misleading and downright dishonest legal representations and filings.
Section 702's entire accountability and oversight architecture is predicated on the Attorney General (AG) and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) acting in good faith to jointly submit accurate annual certifications, targeting procedures, minimization procedures and querying procedures to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which simply accepts those submissions as accurate and made in good faith. The responsible administration of Section 702 depends on the integrity of the individuals signing FISC certifications and on the institutional discipline of the agencies executing them. In 2024 and 2018, I had reasonable confidence that agency leaders would act in good faith and seek to comply with the Constitution and Federal law when providing certifications to the FISC that, to the best of their knowledge, were accurate and honest. That is no longer true today.
Acting AG Todd Blanche and DNI Tulsi Gabbard have repeatedly demonstrated personal loyalty to Donald Trump over their constitutional and statutory duties. We still do not know why DNI Gabbard participated in a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raid in Fulton County, Georgia, that had zero nexus to foreign intelligence and resulted in the Trump administration seizing 2020 election ballots. Meanwhile, in addition to moving convicted sex trafficker and former close Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, to a minimum-security prison where she receives preferential treatment, Acting AG Blanche is now violating his oath of office in creating a $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund to provide cash payouts to convicted criminals who participated in the January 6, 2021, violent insurrection. Simply put, I do not, and cannot, trust either Acting AG Blanche or DNI Gabbard to act in good faith and with the utmost integrity in carrying out Section 702.
The rapid emergence of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including large language models (LLMs), could dismantle the significant manual labor demands of Section 702, which have practically served as a de facto outer guardrail against abuse for years. The number of U.S.-person queries that can be run, the number of selectors that can be tasked, the number of communications that can be read, summarized and acted on-all of these have been bounded by the finite number of career analysts at the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, Central Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center. LLMs and adjacent machine-learning tooling could collapse that bottleneck, empowering a single analyst, equipped with an internally deployed LLM, to summarize, cluster, translate, sentiment-score and entity-link a volume of Section 702-acquired communications that would have required a team of dozens only a couple years ago.
To be clear, I recognize the value of Section 702 as a counterterrorism tool and strongly support targeting valid foreign targets for surveillance. As the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) acknowledged in its April 2026, "Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act":
"...the Section 702 program remains highly valuable to countering an array of critical foreign threats," adding that since 2023, it has "enabled the U.S. government to thwart terrorist attacks, identify and capture members of terrorist groups, locate and facilitate the return of hostages, discover and disrupt international drug trafficking networks, vet non-U.S. persons seeking to travel to the United States for connections to international terrorism and drug trafficking, prevent, detect, and respond to cybersecurity attacks, and counter the proliferation of sensitive technologies."
Importantly, when FISA was reauthorized in 2024 via the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), it was not a clean Section 702 reauthorization. It included important Section 702 program reforms to restrict the use of the authority, strengthen oversight of queries and enhance reporting requirements. For example, the bill codified FBI policy changes that the agency claimed increased its compliance rate with querying requirements to approximately 98 percent in 2023; codified NSA's prohibition of "abouts" collection (a surveillance technique that swept up communications about a target alongside communications to or from the target that the NSA voluntarily ended in 2017); and drastically restricted the number of FBI officials who may authorize a U.S. person query under Section 702 by requiring an FBI supervisor or attorney to affirmatively review and approve all such queries. PCLOB staff independently determined that the reforms to Section 702 enacted in RISAA, "have positively impacted U.S. person privacy and civil liberties and agency compliance with the Section 702 procedures."
Unfortunately, at the start of his second term, President Trump fired two Democratic appointees to the PCLOB without cause or even bothering to provide an explanation. This abuse of power left the PCLOB without a quorum, sabotaging the ability of this critical independent oversight body to carry out its valuable work in overseeing the Section 702 program and other intelligence community (IC) activities. President Trump's actions have rendered the PCLOB inoperable with respect to its statutory mission, which is another major factor that prevents me from supporting Section 702 reauthorization in the 119th Congress. In addition, President Trump engaged in the unlawful mass firing of scores of independent Inspectors General (IGs) upon returning to office and, to date, has failed to nominate a permanent DOJ IG. The lack of a credible, Senate-confirmed DOJ IG undermines efforts to enhance independent oversight of the FBI's Section 702 activities, and further contributes to a dynamic that makes it impossible to support Section 702 reauthorization under current conditions.
As your Senator, I refuse to be rushed or pressured into reauthorizing Section 702 while the Trump administration engages in an unprecedented campaign of lawless retribution against political enemies, journalists and, worst of all, everyday American people. So long as masked, unidentified and heavily armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and U.S. Border Patrol agents are shredding the Fourth Amendment by kicking down doors without a warrant to invade private property and terrorize American citizens, lawful permanent residents, legal immigrants, legal asylum seekers and undocumented individuals alike, I cannot in good conscience vote to reauthorize the powerful Section 702 tool. There is no need to rush this process. The Trump administration, in unclassified settings, has already clearly expressed its view that the FISC has authorized Section 702 activities to continue through March 2027.
To date, there is no evidence that the Trump administration has sought to give ICE access to Section 702 acquisitions. However, there is also no guarantee that such abuse would not take place in the future. And based on the rampant abuses of power that have characterized the second Trump term, Acting AG Blanche, DNI Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel and President Trump have failed to earn the benefit of the doubt. I am committed to supporting our national security and the career civil servants who dedicate their lives to protecting my constituents in Illinois and Americans throughout the country. And achieving this goal requires enacting major structural reforms, enforceable safeguards and securing new agency leadership to protect career national security personnel from improper or unlawful pressure to abuse Section 702 to go after Americans.
If you would like more information on my work in the Senate, please visit my website at www.duckworth.senate.gov. You can access my voting record and see what I am doing to address today's most important issues. I hope that you will continue to share your views and opinions with me and let me know whenever I may be of assistance.