Intelligence community leaders push for renewal of FISA’s Section 702

The National Security Agency had been monitoring a Yahoo account of an al Qaeda courier when it saw someone in the U.S. ask him for the formula to mix explosives in an email.

That 2009 email, which authorities say was snared as part of the government’s collection of communications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), led authorities to Najibullah Zazi, who was orchestrating an attack on New York City’s subway.

Zazi’s thwarted attack has become one of the most important arguments as the intelligence community and security hawks on Capitol Hill push to renew Section 702 of FISA, which permits the collection of emails, phone calls and other communications of foreign targets.

Intelligence community leaders call Section 702 the “holy grail” that has given them access into the minds of foreign adversaries and helped thwart terrorist attacks against Americans and U.S. allies.

And they warn that without Section 702, they would lose track of dangers that could equal or surpass the 2001 terrorist attacks.

“The consequences are really high,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Thursday as he led the House in voting to renew 702 with some new restrictions and protections for Americans whose data gets snared.

Mr. Ryan mentioned the thwarted subway attack and a 2016 airstrike that killed former Islamic State finance minister Haji Iman as two declassified instances in which Section 702 information was confirmed to have played a role.

Data collected through the surveillance program also have prevented attacks against U.S. soldiers overseas and allowed the tracking of weapons from nation states to adversaries who want to harm America, according to Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats.

“It has been an indispensable tool by which we can determine and gain information about threats to the United States, about threats to our troops, about weapons of mass destruction, proliferation, about cyberattacks, about any number of things that threaten the American way and the American people,” Mr. Coats said at an event hosted by the conservative Heritage Foundation in October.

The Civil Liberties Oversight Board reviewed Section 702 and found that it did help the U.S. monitor terrorist networks. The board said more than a quarter of the National Security Agency’s reports on international terrorism use Section 702 data.

Opponents worry the authority can be abused, saying Americans’ data isn’t given enough protections. U.S. citizens and foreigners in the U.S. can have their internet messages scooped up and searched without a warrant in some cases.

“No president should have this power. Yet members of Congress just voted to hand it to an administration that has labeled individuals as threats based merely on their religion, nationality, or viewpoints,” said Neema Singh Guliani, policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The full scope of operations under Section 702 is impossible to know, given the secret nature of the program.

But the government says that the NSA and the CIA searched Section 702 data in 2016 using 5,288 U.S. person identifiers and had 106,469 targets surveilled under the spying tool.

The government contends its searches are focused on foreigners and it’s “very unlikely” a U.S. person would be in contact with one of the foreign targets.

The success stories continue to be a selling point for Section 702.

In the case of Zazi, after spotting his communication with the al Qaeda courier, the NSA alerted the FBI. Authorities used a national security letter, a tool for prying loose information from companies, to learn Zazi’s identity.

They tracked him as he left Colorado for New York to carry out the attack. He became aware of the surveillance and headed back to Colorado, where he was arrested.

“Without the initial tip-off about Zazi and his plans, which came about by monitoring an overseas foreigner under Section 702, the subway-bombing plot might have succeeded,” the Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded.

Some analysts have said other methods outside of Section 702 collections could have been used to reach the same result, but the board disagreed.

In a 2014 report it pointed to about 30 cases it reviewed where Section 702 information was the catalyst for identifying previously unknown terrorists or plots.