Lawmakers earlier on Saturday passed legislation to reauthorize and extend a controversial U.S. surveillance law shortly after the powers expired at midnight, defying opposition from privacy advocates and lawmakers. .

Bill, Joe Passed by a vote of 60-34., reauthorizes powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), known as Section 702, which allows the government to collect the communications of foreign nationals by accessing the records of tech and phone providers. allows Critics, including lawmakers who voted against reauthorization, say FISA also sweeps up Americans' communications while spying on foreign targets.

White House officials and intelligence chiefs have rallied behind efforts to reauthorize FISA, arguing that the law prevents terrorism and cyberattacks and that the reduced powers would harm the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering ability. will The Biden administration claims that the vast majority of classified information in the president's daily intelligence briefing comes from the Section 702 program.

Privacy advocates and rights groups rejected the reauthorization of FISA, which would not require the FBI or NSA to obtain a warrant before searching the Section 702 database of Americans' communications. The FBI and the NSA have been accused of abusing their authority to search Americans' communications without a warrant. A key challenge for some Republicans Initially looking for more privacy protections.

The bipartisan effort is aimed at requiring the government to obtain a warrant before searching its databases for Americans' communications. But it failed before a final vote on the Senate floor.

After its passage early this morning, Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said FISA was “inevitable” for the US intelligence community.

The bill now heads to the president's desk, where it will almost certainly become law.

FISA became law in 1978, before the advent of the modern Internet. Then, in 2013, public scrutiny began to increase. Massive leak of classified documents Exposed the US government's global wiretapping program under FISA, which implicated several major US tech companies and phone companies as unwilling participants.

The Senate was widely expected to pass the surveillance bill, but faced fresh opposition after the House last week approved a version of the legislation that critics say It was said that FISA's reach would be expanded to include smaller companies and telecom providers that were not previously subject to it. Surveillance Law

Communication providers Widely opposed The House's expanded definition of an “electronic communications service provider,” which it said would “unintentionally” include companies outside of major tech companies and telecom providers that already hand over consumer data. are forced to do.

An amendment offered by Senator Ron Wyden to remove the expanded measure from the bill failed to pass on a vote.

Wyden, a Democratic privacy hawk and member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused senators of “waiting until the eleventh hour to ram through a renewal of warrantless surveillance in the dead of night.”

“Time after time, reformers promise that their Band-Aid changes to the law will stop abuses,” Wyden said, “and yet every time, the public learns of fresh abuses by officials who faces very little meaningful oversight,” Wyden said. In a statement.

The bill finally passed shortly after midnight.

Despite the last-minute rush to pass the bill, a key provision in FISA prevents the government's programs under Section 702 from being abruptly shut down if statutory authority expires. FISA requires the government to seek annual certification from the secretive FISA court, which oversees and approves the government's surveillance programs. The FISA Court last certified the government's surveillance program under Section 702 in early April, allowing the government to use its expired authority until at least April 2025.

FISA will now expire at the end of 2026, prompting similar legislation between the next US administrations.