 the House of Representatives on Friday by a vote of 273 to 147. So a comfortable margin. Reauthorized the notorious Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as FISA, through the year 2026. It'll go to the Senate. It'll get signed into law probably by President Biden. Section 702 allows for the government to warrantlessly collect the digital communications, i.e. almost all of them, of non-Americans on foreign soil. And if those non-Americans just happen to be communicating with Americans at the time digitally, then, well, maybe all of those communications will be collected by the National Security Administration or whatever agency as well at the time. Again, without a warrant, that's just collateral collectage is the way that we sort of treat it. And maybe we'll take some of that information and share it with the FBI as part of their domestic investigations, things that we've learned ever since the Edward Snowden revelations 11 years ago. Lawmakers did have an opportunity last week to add an amendment requiring a warrant for that collection to happen on Americans and so therefore be more in line with, I don't know, the United States Constitution and the Fourth Amendment protection. It's thereof that amendment failed by a vote of 212 to 212. There was even a representative who said that she would have voted to have that, but couldn't make it because she was sick. Catherine, can you explain out there slowly to skeptics about why exactly libertarians are not serious about defending this country? Yeah, we are. We are the worst. That is totally correct. And and it's definitely going to be our fault when the terrorists win or something. No, I mean, this is this. You know, fights has to be reauthorized every four years. I guess now it has to be authorized, reauthorized in two years. And that is the only silver lining of this is that we do get to keep having this fight. Because it's really a very important fight. Like this is, as you say, this is a law that allows Americans to be surveilled unconstitutionally. It's it's just it's manifestly unconstitutional. And it's wild to me that we can't get Congress to see it that way. I do think it's interesting that the the MAGA folks who oppose the reauthorization in this case see it as sort of the the FBI needs to be reigned in and that the deep state needs to be checked. Not wrong. Not the way that I would emphasize that on the way I would message it. I think it's the privacy of American citizens, the constitutional rights, the civil liberties of American citizens need to be protected. But this has been a way in for a tremendous amount of FBI and other law enforcement overreach and it should be stopped. And I guess we're going to try again in two years. Yeah. And to follow up on that just, you know, since since this program became public because of Snowden revelations in 2013, there were about 90,000 targets, searches done in this material under 702, Section 702. In 2021, that number had increased to 232,000. So there's a massive increase in the number of searches going on. And then we don't know how many Americans get wrapped up in that kind of stuff. But in 2022, it came out that because of overly broad searches, a U.S. senator had been included in the material that the FBI was kind of pouring through and things like that. So there's a real serious issue here of overreach by our intelligence agencies who consistently fail to show how, you know, abrogating the rights of American citizens somehow makes us safer from terrorism. That's, you know, that is what Catherine is saying. Like we need to focus on that. But it is also true. This is the deep state or the, you know, the national security state at work here and the FBI and the CIA and the NSA have done nothing to assuage fears that they just do whatever the hell they want and then don't even apologize for it later. I mean, this goes back to the 70s and the revelations from the church commission and things like that. So it's good that this came up for a vote and that at the very least that, you know, the reauthorization period has changed from four years to two years, but it should be struck down. Nick, I think you're just not convinced because you don't have access to the special intelligence. Yeah, no, I'm joking. But I'm also sort of like I'm annoyedly serious here because, you know, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Mr. Big used to be against reauthorizing FISA in this way, right? Like used to be one of the critics of this and now he whipped votes for it and his explanation for his flip was, well, you know, I got access to more sensitive intelligence. He won't tell us what it is. They won't ever tell you what it is that's convincing them. They won't ever show you the proof or the results of any of this stuff. And when you do see it, correct, right? No, I mean, because that would be so Trump Trump is like this to where Trump authorized this in 2018 when Paul Ryan went to him and said, oh, you we really need this. Trump was originally against it. And the reason the Republicans voted against it en masse this time is because Trump said simply kill FISA. And then when he thought that it was somehow implicated that this rule was implicated in the the, you know, actions against Carter Page his aid, but they weren't. But wait, Trump's misunderstood how legislation works. No, and it's also a situational situational libertarianism, right? And so we got to take it where we can. We take it when a UFC fighter invokes Mises and loving America at the end of a successful fight. We'll take this. Yeah, he also said here. Go ahead. No, just I think one lesson that's worth sort of highlighting out of this conversation is that on this issue, the normies, the centrist types, they are wrong because who whipped this vote? It was Speaker of the House Johnson, right? And then it was the Biden administration, which spent a huge amount of effort over the last week or two doing behind the scenes lobbying, trying to get Democrats who some of whom were, you know, wavering on this, some of whom have civil liberties concerns, trying to get Democrats on board and particularly with the warrantless part of this, right? And to be clear, the Biden administration was against have the warrant requirements and they wanted that to fail and they whipped votes to ensure that the warrant requirement that would have brought this in line with the Constitution would fail. And so this is a case where the chaos caucus, the weirdos, the MAGA types, the guys who are often like we disagree with them. I think they are in many ways not always productive legislators or members of Congress, right? And I think they are not. They do not always have the best interests of the country in mind. In this case, they are correct. They are the good guys. They're also the the the remnants, the last few stragglers from the libertarian-ish Tea Party generation of which there's still some people, you know, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, they've all, Thomas Massie, you could say Chip Roy too if you wanted to stretch your neck a little bit out of the joint. Chip Roy was out there really complaining about Mike Johnson flipping his votes. He thought that Johnson was with him and he had back to Johnson for the speakers. You know, once about 124 Republicans voted against or voted against the, or voted for the amendment, excuse me, and about 126 Democrats voted against it. So expect those numbers to shift depending if Trump, if this comes up in two years and Trump is president, the sides will shift again. Well, he also said over the weekend, and I think Eric Bain will be writing about this on our site, prediction. I'm not this over the weekend. I'm not a big fan of FISA, but I told everybody do what you want. So yes, the situational libertarianism is not something that you can depend on remotely. That was a clip from the latest Reason Roundtable. If you want to see more clips, go here. If you want to see the whole episode, go here. Make sure to subscribe at Reason's YouTube channel or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, watching or both.