House Proposal Would Reauthorize Section 702 Through 2029 but Leaves Out Warrant Requirement

House leadership’s latest bid to reauthorize Section 702, the U.S. surveillance authority set to lapse April 30, would extend the program through 2029 and add new oversight steps, but it still stops short of the judge-approved warrant requirement privacy advocates have been pressing for before the FBI searches Americans’ communications.

The proposal, released in a House Rules Committee print for consideration Monday as a House amendment to S. 1318, is titled the “Foreign Intelligence Accountability Act.” The print is stamped April 23, 2026, at 12:57 p.m. Under the text, the sunset for Title VII, including Section 702, would move from April 30, 2026, to April 30, 2029. It also says that “no officer or employee of the United States Government may intentionally target a United States person for an acquisition under section 702.”

The bill would also create a monthly civil-liberties review process for FBI searches involving Americans. The FBI would have to provide monthly written statements for each U.S.-person query to the Civil Liberties Protection Officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who would review them and refer suspected problems to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. It would change approval rules for FBI U.S.-person queries by removing supervisor approval language, effectively requiring approval by an FBI attorney instead, and it would add criminal penalties for FBI employees who knowingly and willfully violate querying procedures, including a fine, up to five years in prison, or both. The measure also directs the Government Accountability Office to audit Section 702 targeting procedures and report to congressional committees within one year of enactment.

What the bill does not do is impose a blanket statutory rule requiring the FBI to get a judge-issued warrant before running U.S.-person queries of Section 702-acquired content. For U.S. persons, the text says the government may seek a Title I surveillance order, a Title III physical search order, an order under Sections 703, 704 or 705, or a criminal warrant. But it does not create an across-the-board warrant-before-query requirement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, said in an April 27 post that “The bill does not create a warrant requirement, it does not create any new transparency requirements, and it does not protect Americans’ privacy.”

Section 702 allows the government to collect the communications of non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes. The long-running dispute is that Americans’ messages can be swept up incidentally when they communicate with those foreign targets. The FBI can then search that database using identifiers linked to Americans, a practice critics often call “backdoor searches.” Whether those searches should require a warrant has become the central fight in the reauthorization debate.

The procedural clock is tight. Congress already approved a short-term continuation through April 30, 2026, on April 17, giving lawmakers more time to negotiate a longer reauthorization. The new House amendment was posted for Rules Committee consideration Monday at 1 p.m., just days before that temporary extension expires.

The debate has also been shaped by a federal court ruling from early 2025. A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York said U.S.-person queries of Section 702 data ordinarily require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, a conclusion that quickly became a major reference point for privacy advocates in this year’s fight. The scale of the authority is also significant: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its transparency report for calendar year 2025 that there were an estimated 349,823 Section 702 targets.