Legislator Apparently Used Slides Of NYC Protests In His Pitch For Reauthorizing Section 702 Surveillance

As the debate over Section 702 continues, more weird stuff keeps happening. For once, there’s serious opposition to a clean renewal, and it’s coming from both sides of the legislature. Then there are things like this, which is one of the stranger incidents to accompany a surveillance fight, as reported by Dell Cameron for Wired.

At a private meeting about the reauthorization of a major United States surveillance program late last year, the Republican chairman of the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) presented an image of Americans protesting the war in Gaza while implying possible ties between the protesters and Hamas, an allegation that was used to illustrate why surveillance reforms may prove detrimental to national security, WIRED has learned. Sources who attended the meeting say it alarmed Republicans who are pursuing new limits on the US government’s power to warrantlessly access the communications of US citizens.

Yeah, that should alarm everyone, not just Republicans looking for any reason to stick it to the FBI after a few of their own (Trump supporters all) got swept up by the Bureau’s warrantless access to the NSA’s ostensibly foreign-facing collection.

Now, there are lots of reasons most Republicans aren’t happy with this development. The first reason was listed in the previous paragraph. They also may not like protesters being placed under surveillance because many of them still make excuses for the insurrectionists in their midst and love to portray the January 6th invasion of the Capitol building as a protest that just got a little out of hand.

Republicans are also aware this is an executive power and right now they don’t have their own guy as Chief Executive. That’s another reason to oppose a clean reauthorization of Section 702 surveillance powers. The fact that Biden himself has asked for clean reauthorization is another reason to oppose it, even if they might have supported one with Trump still in office.

But this is still pretty disturbing, all politics aside. HPSCI Chairman Mike Turner apparently felt these slides were appropriate for a discussion of a foreign-facing surveillance power — one that’s come under considerable fire for the FBI’s constant, casual abuse of this collection to engage in warrantless domestic surveillance.

Mike Turner, of course, doesn’t really want anything to happen to Section 702. And, given this presentation, it seems clear he doesn’t mind if the FBI uses it to target American citizens, even those engaged in protected First Amendment activities. Faced with an actual reform bill that would codify a warrant requirement for accessing US persons’ communications, Turner fired off a competing “reform” proposal.

His proposal would have codified the FBI’s voluntary changes (which do not include a warrant requirements) and exempt people like him from being targeted by backdoor searches of NSA collections. His reform would force the FBI to notify Congress members if they had been subject to a 702 query and seek permission from certain government officials before gathering information that might include communications harvested by the NSA. As for the rest of us, nothing.

Turner’s briefing — and his startling PowerPoint presentation — were part of a concerted effort to talk legislators into dropping the proposed warrant requirement. I guess the good news is that this attempt failed spectacularly and may have even pushed some people off the fence towards the side demanding warrants.

As you read the next few paragraphs, keep in mind this is coming from the head of the House Intelligence Committee, which is not only a committee (meaning several legislators are involved) but one with access to actual intelligence (in the spy sense of the word), interns, staffers, advisors, aides, and any number of people who might have been able to head this off before it happened.

Instead, now that it’s been made public, the PR wing of the HPSCI has offered up whatever the fuck this is:

A spokesperson for the House Intelligence Committee said in an email on Friday that the protesters depicted in the slide had “responded to what appears to be a Hamas solicitation.”

A WIRED review of the slides shown by Turner casts doubt on that claim. Notably, while the two slides were portrayed as being related to a single protest in November outside Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s Brooklyn residence, WIRED has since learned that the slides reference two separate events that occurred nearly a month apart.

What’s more, the allegation that the protesters were following Hamas’ lead is based on a post on X that contains false information about who organized one of these two events.

Jeff Naft, the HPSCI spokesperson, further stated that the purpose of the slides was to “illustrate” that even if the pictured protesters “had ties to Hamas,” they could not be lawfully surveilled using Section 702.

I have no reason to believe that was the original intent of the slides. But even if it was, no one who viewed this presentation saw it that way, as Cameron reports.

“At the outset of the presentation, he’s running through slides, making his case for why 702 reauthorization is needed,” a senior Republican aide tells WIRED. “Then he throws up that photo. The framing was: ‘Here are protesters outside of Chuck Schumer’s house. We need to be able to use 702 to query these people.’”

Another aide in attendance said: “The sentiment was that [Turner] wanted to know if these people were talking to Hamas. That’s how I interpreted why he brought up those slides.”

That appears to have been the intent, no matter what Turner’s spokesperson is saying after the fact. If Naft is supposed to be the spin doctor, the HPSCI needs to sue him for malpractice.

And even if anyone in attendance agreed with Turner’s insinuation that pro-Palestinian protesters should be placed under the Section 702-enabled microscope, at least they’re smart enough to realize how this sort of thing works if it becomes the FBI’s new pattern-and-practice following reauthorization:

“What we know for sure is this,” a Republican aide says, “However the government decides to treat left-wing protesters today, that’s how we should expect protesters in our party to be treated under future administrations.”

That’s how it works. Surveillance powers like Section 702 cross administrations. They don’t align with election years. And that should nudge more legislators to consider what’s best in the long run, rather than what’s politically expedient. And, no matter how you feel about the FBI and its steady dipping into the NSA pool, you should never try to insinuate that political protesters should be subjected to domestic surveillance.