 I want to talk about something that's really pressing that's unfolding in DC right now, which is a vote on the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act, and as part of that, the reauthorization of something called Section 702, which essentially allows the government to surveil communications between American citizens and foreign targets without a warrant. And it seems like now after some resistance, a clean reauthorization of that is unlikely to happen. They're attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is kind of like the defense budget for the year, and they're trying to slip a more temporary extension into that. Could you just tell us what is at stake for Americans with this issue? Right, so we're not trying to eliminate the FISA 702 program. It was established to allow our intelligence agencies to spy on foreigners without a warrant. In order to qualify to be spied on without a warrant, you have to be outside of the country, and you have to be not an American citizen. If you're inside the country, or if you're an American citizen outside of the country, you can't be spied on by this program. Okay, sounds great, right? But we've got 250,000 people on that list that we're collecting information on, and in the process of collecting that information, if you talk to a business person in France, for instance, your emails and stuff may get caught up in this data collection. Well, what they've been doing is they go into this giant ball of data and they put in your name. They can put in Zach's name and search it without a warrant, without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, or any of those sort of legal thresholds, not to investigate suspects, but to create suspects. Let's say that you and Liz are at a protest and they develop some nexus. They say, well, we think these protesters were inspired by Russia. Well, we're just going to run all the protesters names through this database. Now, even though the Intel community doesn't concede that they need a warrant for this, they've admitted that they violated their own protocols hundreds of thousands of times when they search for US persons data in this haystack. They say, well, it was created legally, so we don't need a warrant to go search it. There are two proposals to reauthorize this program. By the way, the only chance you ever get to reform these programs is when they expire. So it's important that they do expire occasionally. And this one expires in January. And in the Judiciary Committee, which Jim Jordan chairs and on which I serve, we've marked up a bill that would require them to get a warrant. It would create criminal penalties for people in the executive branch who abuse the program because there's never any culpability or blowback for anybody that's abused this program. But this would create that. So we've created this reform bill. And then the Intel committee has created a bill, which is less than ideal. It doesn't have a warrant requirement. It doesn't have many of the reporting requirements back to Congress that the Judiciary Bill has. And in fact, it expands their ability to collect information to, for instance, if you had free Wi-Fi at a cafe, that service provider would be treated like Google or Verizon now, and they would have to create a direct pipeline to the Intel agencies for any of the communications that go through that. So you got two proposals out there and we're running out of time. So what Speaker Johnson has proposed and some senators have proposed, oh, let's just keep the old program in place for a little bit longer. Your basic congressional kicking the can down the road exercise, that's going to be passing the Senate probably today unless Mike Lee and Rand Paul can stop it. Then it comes to the house, probably tomorrow. Now, an interesting thing here is I serve on the rules committee and Chip Roy and Ralph Norman do as well. And we told the powers to be we're not going to, we can't go along with this. So they couldn't pass a rule to combine the FISA program with the NDAA. That's how they're going to try and get it through attach it to must pass legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act. Well, we said no, this shall not pass the rules committee. So they're going to try and do this on suspension, which and there's a house rule that says if you want to suspend all of our regular rules and expedite something, you need a two thirds vote of the house. So this is going to be interesting to see if they can get effectively 290 people to vote for it. Yeah, it is interesting because if you think back to when a lot of Americans were first awakened to this with the Snowden revelations about a decade ago, there were some sort of, you know, lonely dissenters to just rubber stamping this stuff yourself among them. Some of the other people you mentioned, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, some people on the Democratic side of the aisle, it does seem as if now there's more resistance. I mean, I assume some of that has to do with the way FISA was used against the Trump administration. Do you feel like there's the political tides have shifted somewhat to the advantage of people who care about privacy and government surveillance? Yeah, the tides haven't just shifted. The stars have aligned. Okay, we've never had a chairman of either the Intel Committee or the Judiciary Committee who made reforming this program one of their priorities. And so with Jim Jordan, we're very lucky to have him as the chairman of this committee. And this is one of his signature agendas is to get this reform because we have seen abuses that have been used against the president, President Trump. So a lot of conservatives have woken up to the fact that this program is being used against them. You have liberals who are upset about the program. Obviously, the FBI is using this against Black Lives Matter as well. And we know that to be the case. So you do have this coalition of the left and the right. It used to be a coalition of maybe a dozen people, right? Like it was me and Justin Amash and Zoell Offgren and Tulsi Gabbard maybe who were concerned about this. And we used to come together and we would offer amendments to try to fix this in the funding bills. We would try to defund some of this stuff, which is a really blunt instrument. It's a lot easier to write a legislation that affects the laws than it is to just defund something. And they would pat us on the head and say, well, we appreciate the sentiment, but this isn't the time or place to do what you're doing. And you shouldn't be mucking around with the funding. But now is the time and place. The program is expiring. We've got a chairman who's sympathetic to the cause and a lot of people, a lot more people on the left and the right who are, you know, this reported out of the judiciary committee, 35 to two. There were only two dissenters and it was on the Democrat side to the judiciary FISA reform bill. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week. So subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.