A FISA Surveillance Compromise Worth Passing

Congress is trying to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week, and doing it right is crucial for national security. The House Intelligence and Judiciary committees have worked out a sensible compromise that can protect Americans from foreign jihadists as well as domestic abuses of power. The risk is that they’ll muck it up with damaging amendments.

The debate concerns FISA Section 702 that lets the government monitor the communications of foreigners overseas. The information is stored in a database, which can be searched by U.S. intelligence officials for names or keywords. This is a vital antiterror tool, though U.S. persons contacted from abroad are sometimes caught in the data searches.

The concern is that Federal Bureau of Investigation officials have on occasion abused their access to search for American names that aren’t plausibly linked to terrorism. The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, championed by Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, imposes new guardrails as well as criminal penalties for abuse. But it also preserves the ability to surveil and act with dispatch without introducing onerous bureaucratic barriers.