Tulsi Gabbard Says She Now Supports Controversial Surveillance Law

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Gabbard had previously criticized Section 702 as enabling the government to ’trample’ upon civil liberties.

WASHINGTON—Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s intended nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, announced on Jan. 10 that she supports reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—a controversial statute criticized by both progressives and conservatives that she previously opposed.

Section 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to collect information en masse from foreign targets through large-scale surveillance programs, which may sometimes collect the non-public data of U.S. citizens and others inside the United States. Ordinarily, to collect such information, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment requires the government to obtain a warrant against individual targets.

Critics of Section 702 believe the law’s provisions infringe upon the civil liberties of activists and dissidents. Conservatives, in particular, have assailed the law after its use in 2016 to surveil Trump campaign advisers during investigations of Russian influence.

Gabbard has been a longstanding critic of Section 702, including during her terms in Congress as a Democrat. She switched to the Republican Party last year.

“[T]he civil liberties of the American people have been trampled on under the blank check of Section 702 … [it’s] allowed our government to collect, retain, and search communications of everyday Americans without a warrant and with blatant disregard for our Fourth Amendment constitutional rights,” Gabbard wrote on Twitter in 2018.

She said on Friday that, since her previous criticism, “significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues.”

“Section 702, unlike other FISA authorities, is crucial for gathering foreign intelligence on non-U.S. persons abroad. This unique capability cannot be replicated and must be safeguarded,” Gabbard wrote in a statement regarding her position.

Gabbard’s reversal, which coincides with her ongoing effort to garner support from Senate Republicans—many of whom support Section 702—for confirmation of her nomination, was criticized by progressive and conservative activists who oppose the statute.

“This is how Washington really works: GOP Senators are telling Tulsi Gabbard that the only way she has a chance to be confirmed is if she renounces her long-standing opposition to mass FBI/NSA domestic spying powers, and vows to support FISA Section 702,” wrote Glenn Greenwald, an attorney and journalist who published documents leaked by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden in 2013, on X.

Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney who led Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, wrote: “This is very bad. The Senate Intelligence Committee should not be controlling the President or the country.”

Gabbard served in the House from 2013 to 2021 and was a member of the House Committees on Foreign Affairs, Homeland Security, and Armed Services, including its Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations.

In the weeks since the announcement of her nomination, she has been meeting with Republican senators to earn their support for her nomination.