Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expired June 12 after Congress failed to pass a renewal, but the warrantless surveillance it authorizes didn't stop with it.
Title VII of FISA, which houses Section 702, hit its statutory sunset without any Congressional action. The program doesn't shut off automatically. It operates under yearlong certifications issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the current one, signed March 17, 2026, runs until March 2027. That means the intelligence community continues collecting the communications of foreign targets abroad, including Americans swept up incidentally, on exactly the same legal footing as before.
Why that matters: the "it will go dark" warnings that preceded the deadline were, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a deliberate pressure tactic. Surveillance proponents used the artificial crisis to push lawmakers into reauthorizing the program without adding meaningful privacy protections, such as requiring a warrant before querying data belonging to Americans. Congress actually built the lapse-contingency into the statute itself, which rather undercuts the panic.
Civil liberties advocates now have until early 2027 to push for reforms before any real deadline arrives. Whether Congress uses that window to add guardrails, or simply waits for the next manufactured emergency, is a separate question with a predictable answer.