The FBI Is Quietly Spying on Americans. The FISA Fight Could Stop It

A law that has allowed federal law enforcement and national security agencies to access the private communications of American citizens without a warrant for years is facing a bipartisan challenge in Congress. A key provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), set to expire on April 30, has been used by investigators to intentionally access Americans’ data for domestic investigations through "backdoor queries," without judicial sign-off and with little transparency. According to a recently declassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI increased its searches on Americans in 2025 by 34% from the previous year, to more than 7,000. Read more: Inside the First Major U.S. Bill Tackling AI Harms—and Deepfake AbuseAs the deadline approaches, a growing number of lawmakers are opposing a clean extension of the controversial provision, Section 702, without meaningful reforms, despite mounting pressure from the White House. If successful, lawmakers could dramatically reduce the government's power to spy on Americans at a time when such surveillance is escalating sharply. In an interview with TIME, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime advocate for Section 702 reform, says he believes federal lawmakers have "opportunities that we've never had before" to curtail its power.Advertisement"The fact that all the Democrats but four said they wanted more than a straight authorization, the fact that we have Republicans in the House [supporting a reform], the fact that members are seeing that Donald Trump [goes] unchecked [on] FISA is a real threat to America. This gives us opportunities we've never had before," he says.The FBI, in particular, has been expanding its warrantless data searches to American public officials and prominent political targets. A new report from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent government agency, reveals that queries concerning political, religious, and media organizations or their prominent figures surged from 227 in 2024 to 839 in 2025. The board also found in 2021 that the FBI had conducted hundreds of searches on Black Lives Matter and Jan. 6 protesters while lacking "a proper justification."FISA's power to conduct backdoor searches on American citizens has long angered lawmakers in both parties. Tulsi Gabbard, who now oversees the intelligence community, introduced a bill with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky in 2020, when she was a member of Congress, to stop warrantless searches on American citizens. The bill ultimately failed to pass the House.AdvertisementYet opposition in Washington has yielded only incremental reforms in the past few years, with measures that Wyden called "toothless." In 2024, Congress passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which bans backdoor searches conducted without a foreign intelligence purpose and adds training and approval requirements for FBI personnel running such searches. Two years after the bill's passage, a court found that the FBI is still violating RISAA by accessing Americans' messages through an advanced filtering tool that the Justice Department had previously shut down over privacy concerns. "Overwhelmingly, the 2024 bill really didn't offer reforms with teeth and the chance to really change much of anything," Wyden says.What is the FISA court? Following the Watergate scandal in the 1970s,…

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