Congress is voting this week on whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (colloquially known as FISA). The program expires April 20. If it passes clean — with no reforms and no warrant requirements — the federal government retains the authority to search Americans’ communications without a warrant, indefinitely, with no meaningful court check.
But this is not a foreign surveillance debate. It is a domestic one.
The FBI has used Section 702-collected data to run warrantless searches on Black Lives Matter protesters, journalists, members of Congress, and 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign. As of April 9, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that compliance failures the Justice Department claimed to have fixed are, in its words, ongoing across the intelligence community. The FBI is conducting more searches than ever. It is getting useful results less often. That is not a targeted intelligence program.
That is a fishing expedition with judicial cover.
Maryland’s own Jamie Raskin voted for reauthorization in 2024. He is opposing it now, arguing the Trump administration has systematically dismantled the safeguards Congress attached two years ago. He is right. The 98-member Congressional Progressive Caucus has formally committed to block any clean extension. Good. The question is whether that holds.
I oppose a clean reauthorization. Section 702 should not be extended without a warrant requirement for queries targeting Americans, and without closing the data broker loophole that lets federal agencies buy what they cannot legally collect.
If those reforms cannot pass, the program should expire.
That position will be called naïve by people who have never read a procurement contract and reckless by people who have never had their communications searched without their knowledge. I have spent fifteen years building federal health IT systems. I know how data gets collected, how it gets stored, and what happens when agencies decide to connect datasets that were never supposed to touch each other. The surveillance debate is not abstract to me.
And Section 702 is not the whole story.
The license plate readers — the ALPRs going up on county roads across MD-06 without public votes, without community input, without scrutiny — are just the entry point. I have been fighting that through the MD-06 Privacy Project, more commonly known as DeFlock MD-06.
But the infrastructure being built around us runs deeper than Flock Safety.
Flock just announced that police departments will be able to request live video feeds and 15-second clips from what were sold as plate-reading cameras, with AI-powered natural language search across the footage. Meanwhile, Flock has begun connecting its location data to commercial data brokers, creating a pipeline that routes around the Fourth Amendment entirely. If law enforcement cannot legally collect it directly, they buy it. Flock automates that transaction.
This is the surveillance stack. Not a collection of gadgets, but a system being assembled without democratic accountability, contract by contract, with no federal law governing any of it.
Over a twelve-month period, law enforcement conducted nearly 3,000 immigration-related searches on Virginia’s Flock network. Ninety percent were conducted by out-of-state agencies acting on behalf of ICE. Some Virginia departments did not know their data was being accessed this way. Charlottesville found out and cut off federal access, but most agencies have not.
That is the deportation pipeline. Not just the detention facility in Williamsport — the infrastructure feeding it. Surveillance systems built and sold as public safety tools become the technical backbone of mass removal. The data does not care what it was collected for.
ICE has assembled a broader arsenal on top of this. The agency holds a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI, matching faces against billions of photos scraped from social media, news sites, and dating apps without user consent. ICE is using that technology in Illinois, where state law bars local police from accessing Clearview at all. There is no equivalent federal prohibition. ICE operates anyway, with no local oversight and no legal constraint.
ShotSpotter deploys acoustic sensors in urban neighborhoods, claiming to detect gunshots. Chicago’s inspector general found it led officers to the correct location less than 10% of the time. Departments are still paying for it. Deployment has been concentrated in Black and Latino communities.
Predictive policing algorithms tell departments where crime is likely to occur — and in some implementations, who is likely to commit it. These systems are trained on historical arrest data, which encodes decades of racially biased policing. The algorithm predicts what the data teaches it to predict. Communities of color get over-surveilled. The data confirms they should be surveilled more. The loop closes.
The legal framework governing all of this is nearly nonexistent.
There is no federal biometric privacy law. Illinois has the Biometric Information Privacy Act — the strongest protection in the country, passed in 2008. It covers Illinois residents. No one else.
There is no federal facial recognition moratorium. A handful of cities have banned it. Some states are moving. Congress has introduced bills. None have passed.
There is no federal algorithmic accountability standard for policing. Departments can buy and deploy any system they want. They rarely disclose it. They are almost never required to audit it.
This is the gap. Nobody running for MD-06’s seat is filling it.
My opponent April McClain Delaney has sponsored the GUARDRAILS Act, a bill that would prevent states from regulating AI. Whatever its intentions, the practical effect is to make it harder for states to protect residents from algorithmic harm, not easier.
Alexis Goldstein has done serious work on financial data privacy. Financial data and biometric data are different threat categories. Your credit history being sold is bad. Your face being in a law enforcement database without your knowledge is categorically different. One affects your wallet. The other affects your freedom of movement.
Here is what I would actually do.
Oppose a clean Section 702 reauthorization. Any extension must include a warrant requirement for queries targeting Americans and close the data broker loophole. If those reforms cannot pass, the program should not be extended.
A federal facial recognition moratorium for law enforcement, pending independent accuracy and bias audits. Every major study has found these systems perform dramatically worse on darker-skinned faces, on women, on older people. Deploying them at scale before those problems are solved means building discriminatory systems into law enforcement infrastructure.
Stop. Audit. Then decide.
Federal biometric data privacy legislation with a private right of action. If a company or government agency collects your biometric data without consent, you should be able to sue. BIPA works in Illinois because it has teeth. A federal law should too.
Algorithmic transparency requirements for law enforcement. If a department is using a predictive policing tool, residents have a right to know. The algorithm’s methodology should be auditable by independent researchers. Procurement decisions should go through public processes.
Close the data broker loophole at every level. ICE and other federal agencies are buying commercial surveillance data to get around Fourth Amendment restrictions on direct collection. If the government cannot collect it without a warrant, it cannot buy it from a data broker.
I built the MD-06 Privacy Project because this district deserves a representative who understands technology well enough to regulate it. Not someone deferring to tech industry lobbyists. Not someone still learning what an ALPR is. Someone who can walk into a markup on an algorithmic accountability bill and know what is at stake.
Fifteen years of federal health IT work gives you that. Not opinions about tech policy — working knowledge of how these systems get built, how they get deployed, and how they quietly become permanent.
The surveillance stack is being assembled right now. Piece by piece, contract by contract, without a public vote and without congressional oversight worth the name.
The Section 702 vote this week is one moment in that longer story.
It matters. So does everything being built beneath it.
This article was originally published on Ethan Wechtaluk’s Substack. Republished on TANTV News with permission.
