On June 12, FISA 702 lapsed. This infamously intrusive law allowed every President from George W. Bush through to Trump to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ communications. However, even though the statute has lapsed, the surveillance it enabled is still going on. That’s authorized through till March 2027, without further action by Congress. So the government can still use FISA 702 to harass, surveil and even prosecute the innocent.
Currently, the fight in Congress is about whether Bill Pulte will continue as Acting Director of National Intelligence, or be replaced by someone the Senate finds more palatable. Pulte aroused Democratic concerns by using his tenure at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to go after the President’s enemies with allegations of mortgage fraud. If Pulte were replaced, there would be more Members willing to vote to reauthorize FISA Title VII. However, before the President even proposed Pulte as DNI, efforts at a long-term FISA 702 reauthorization without warrant reforms had already failed several times. So, even if Pulte is replaced, it’s unlikely that the math will math; without adding warrant protections for Americans, there likely still won’t be a Congressional majority for reauthorization. President Trump is also not helping the FISA math by repeatedly suggesting linking the already-controversial FISA reauthorization to the toxic-to-all-Democrats SAVE America Act.
It gets worse. The problem with FISA isn’t which out of many potential loyalists President Trump happens to pick for DNI. The problem is substantive and technological. FISA section 702, combined with new administrative executive orders, combined with new artificial intelligence capabilities, means that it’s much easier than it was a few years ago for intelligence community analysts to surveil and prosecute Americans who have committed no crime. The brief below, based on research by Pat Eddington of the CATO Institute and developed in partnership with the Ludlow Institute, explains how.
To be fair, such investigations were already possible, just less easy. The 2008 Mukasey guidelines allowed FBI to open tens of thousands of “assessments” without any criminal predicate. Under the first Trump administration, the FBI used FISA 702 to investigate over 100 Black Lives Matter organizers; under Biden, the FBI investigated “radical traditionalist Catholics.” We may not have a single “domestic terrorism law”, but FBI has developed an extensive framework of “domestic extremism designations,” where it attaches the label “violent” to people’s peaceful First Amendment-protected activity that FBI speculates may someday turn violent. At some point, it’s very likely that FBI opened an assessment on Restore The Fourth itself. And the latest in this stream of abusive “domestic extremist designations,” reported by WIRED in May, is “anti-tech violent extremism“, which FBI is likely currently using to target peaceful protesters against data centers and people concerned about the proliferation of AI.
So, with that, let’s explore what a government agent can now do, armed with presidential executive orders, FISA 702, and AI:
https://restorethe4th.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/AI-Makes-Surveillance-Simple-2026-06-18.pdf