The White House has released an unclassified version of a review conducted by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702.
The PIAB report concludes that Section 702 is key to generating intelligence data needed to safeguard the U.S. from various threats, such as cyberattacks, terrorism, illegal export of critical technology and foreign influence on democracy.
“We agree with the unanimous conclusion reached by this group of independent, deeply experienced experts that failure to reauthorize Section 702 could be ‘one of the worst intelligence failures of our time,’” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, principal deputy national security adviser, said in a statement published Monday.
Sullivan and Finer stated that they agree with the board’s recommendation that the authority should be reauthorized without new damaging restrictions on assessing intelligence gathered by the government.
The report presents a list of 13 recommendations, such as directing the attorney general to remove FBI’s authority to perform queries for evidence of a non-national security-related crime in its Section 702 data and requiring the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a rigorous pre-approval standard that is consistent across all agencies for U.S. person content queries.
Other recommendations are establishing within the executive branch a centralized, independent review mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of the entire compliance and oversight system on a regular basis and enhancing transparency by declassifying the certifications specifying the categories of authorized collection under Section 702, which is set to expire on Dec. 31.
“We look forward to reviewing the Board’s recommendations for how we can secure this critical national security authority and to working with Congress to ensure its reauthorization,” Finer and Sullivan noted.
