FISA 702 Expires in Days. Congress Is Still Stalling.
With Section 702 set to lapse on June 12 and a secret FISA Court opinion the intelligence community refuses to declassify, Congress is about to hand the NSA and FBI another blank check — while Palantir quietly begins tracking the federal workforce itself.
The clock is running. The 45-day extension of FISA Section 702 that Congress passed on April 30 — by a House vote of 261-111 and a unanimous Senate — expires on or around June 12, 2026. As of today, there is no deal. There is no reform bill. There is a classified court opinion that the intelligence community is actively resisting making public, and a surveillance contractor called Palantir that just activated a new federal contract to monitor the very government employees who administer these programs.
This is the surveillance state in 2026: expanding in every direction at once, accountable in none.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the NSA and associated agencies to collect the communications of foreign targets located abroad — without an individualized court order. The problem, as civil liberties advocates have documented for years, is what happens after collection. The FBI, CIA, NSA, and National Counterterrorism Center conduct thousands of warrantless 'backdoor searches' of that data each year, querying for Americans' phone calls, text messages, and emails. That practice has resulted in what the Brennan Center has called a program rife with 'widespread violations' — searches targeting racial justice protesters, congressional staff, campaign donors, journalists, and at least one sitting judge who had reported civil rights violations by local police.
Congress reauthorized 702 in April 2024 via the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, known as RISAA, setting a two-year sunset of April 20, 2026. By August of that same year — within months of passage — the Department of Justice discovered that the FBI had been using a querying tool that allowed analysts to access Americans' communications while bypassing the very procedures RISAA was supposed to enforce: attorney approval, written justification, internal audit trail. It took months to shut the tool down.
Then, in March 2026, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued a new opinion objecting to filter tools that FBI and NSA analysts use to process queried messages. The FISC judge who authorized the program's annual recertification on March 17 also flagged these tools as prone to abuse, ordering intelligence agencies to re-engineer them to comply with existing rules on American data. That opinion remains classified. Senate Intelligence Committee leadership — Senators Tom Cotton and Mark Warner — wrote to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche requesting declassification within 15 days of the April 30 extension. That window has closed. DNI has not complied.
'If they fail to declassify this opinion in the window that's been requested, it would be concrete proof that the government is hiding information from Congress before a critical vote,' said Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress.
The April saga that produced the current 45-day extension is worth detailing for its structural cynicism. The House first tried and failed to pass a three-year reauthorization. Then, on April 17, both chambers passed a 10-day patch just before the original April 20 expiration. Then on April 29, the House passed a three-year extension by a 235-191 vote — but attached to it was an unrelated ban on a Federal Reserve central bank digital currency. Senate Majority Leader John Thune called it a 'poison pill' that was 'not happening.' The Senate stripped the provision, passed a clean 45-day extension by unanimous consent, and sent it back. The House passed that, 261-111, hours before midnight.
The net result: no reforms. No warrant requirement for backdoor searches of Americans' data. The program runs as-is through roughly June 12, and the Senate, which returned from recess May 11, must now attempt what it has failed to do for years — agree on what it even means for the government to 'query' an American's communications.
The American Prospect, in a May 11 report, noted a related data point that deserves more attention: according to a recent government transparency report, the number of unique identifiers associated with information collected under the already-expired Section 215 — the old Patriot Act authority — surged 324 percent last year, surpassing 268,000. Section 215 technically expired in March 2020. The data collection apparently did not stop. The Director of National Intelligence did not answer questions about the transparency report when asked.
Against this backdrop, a second surveillance story has materialized with less fanfare but equal significance. On May 1, 2026, Palantir Technologies activated a $3.9 million contract with the Department of Agriculture to track federal employee return-to-office compliance. Federal spending records describe the work as: design, configure, deploy and manage a secure tool to track USDA employees' return to the office. The contract was awarded sole-source — no competitive bidding, one bid received — and carries a potential ceiling of $13.3 million through September 2027. Palantir's stated justification: only its 'mission-critical' operations could deliver the tool in days, not years.
The contract specifications include 'real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments' and 'continuous compliance monitoring' for detecting 'threats or anomalies' among staff. This is the same company that built ICE's ImmigrationOS deportation targeting platform on a $30 million contract, that holds an Army enterprise agreement valued at up to $10 billion, that received over $180 million from the IRS since 2018, and that in the first quarter of 2026 reported $1.6 billion in revenue — an 85 percent growth rate year over year. According to a ProPublica disclosure database analysis, 144 Trump administration appointees hold Palantir compensation, employment, or investment ties.
The USDA bossware contract is not an isolated procurement. It sits inside a $300 million 'National Farm Security Action Plan' umbrella agreement USDA and Palantir signed in 2025, a contract that also consolidates farmer records across agencies into what Palantir has branded the 'One Farmer, One File' initiative — a unified database of land holdings, conservation practices, insurance claims, and financial data for every farmer interacting with USDA. Workforce surveillance is a feature embedded inside a much larger data consolidation architecture. The employees being monitored are the same employees administering agricultural subsidies, food stamp programs, and conservation grants.
Michael Martinez, managing counsel of Democracy Forward's Civil Service Strong, put it plainly: the spending disclosures reveal that the administration is more interested in monitoring and intimidating public servants than in governing. AFGE Council 220 President Jessica LaPointe, representing Social Security Administration workers, warned that SSA is already at a 59-year staffing low — and that surveillance metrics measuring office occupancy could be weaponized to justify further office closures and reductions, distorting what is actually a public service demand problem into a productivity failure.
The surveillance apparatus, in other words, is now turned inward. The agencies that execute the surveillance state are themselves being surveilled by the surveillance contractor that helps build the surveillance state. That recursive architecture is not an accident. It is, as one analyst noted, the apparatus being instrumented to surveil its own administrators.
Congress has until approximately June 12 to act on Section 702. The reform bill with the most civil liberties substance — the Government Surveillance Reform Act, introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Rep. Warren Davidson, Sen. Ron Wyden, and Sen. Mike Lee — would require warrants for 702 queries involving Americans, ban government purchases of Americans' data from commercial brokers without a warrant, and close the 'about collection' loophole that allows the NSA to grab communications that merely mention a target. It has not passed committee. Speaker Johnson has instead floated what the EFF has called a 'fig leaf' — the Foreign Intelligence Accountability Act — which attaches no probable cause warrant requirement and provides no outside oversight mechanism.
The pattern is consistent and by now familiar: a sunset approaches, the intelligence community applies pressure, Congress patches rather than reforms, and the program continues with its documented abuses intact.
I spent years inside the architecture of American signals intelligence. I know what these programs look like from the inside — the scale of what gets collected, the looseness of what counts as a legitimate query, the institutional resistance to any constraint that slows the pipeline. What I'm watching right now is not a governance failure. It is a governance choice. Congress has had two years since RISAA to prepare reforms. It instead ran the clock down to hours before midnight, twice. The FISC issued a damning opinion about broken filter tools in March, and the DNI is running out the clock on declassifying it before the June vote. Palantir, which paid zero federal income tax in 2025 on $1.5 billion in domestic income while collecting hundreds of millions in federal contracts, is now the physical presence in federal office buildings tracking which public servants showed up to their desks. If nothing changes, the winner is clear: a privatized, AI-enabled surveillance infrastructure with no warrant requirement, no meaningful judicial check, and a contractor ecosystem so deeply embedded in federal agencies that it effectively administers the state it monitors. The losers are 330 million Americans whose communications, tax records, agricultural data, and employment status are now rows in someone else's database.
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