Tulsi Gabbard Now Supports Surveillance of American Citizens Via section 702
The Epoch Times is reporting that Tulsi Gabbard, who once opposed reauthorization of 702, now, as she is set to become Trump’s director of national intelligence.
“[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 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.