This is an adapted excerpt from the May 3 episode of “Velshi.”
On Thursday, the Senate passed a 45-day extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one of the most sweeping surveillance powers in American law. The extension was passed under the pretext that Congress would use the time to negotiate real reforms.
But this is just the latest in a long bipartisan tradition of treating warrantless access to your private communications as a feature, not a bug.
To understand why this matters, you have to go back to the days after the 9/11 attacks. In that atmosphere of deep national trauma, the Bush administration moved quickly to expand the government’s surveillance powers.
At its center is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created after Watergate to provide judicial oversight of foreign intelligence targets. The court operates in secret, with the government as the only party present. Over time, it has become little more than a rubber stamp, approving the vast majority of surveillance requests, according to government transparency reports. Government transparency reports show that in 2025, the court fully denied just four out of 287 surveillance applications, less than 2%.
When the government surveils a foreign target, it inevitably sweeps up the communications of any American on the other end of those conversations too.
Under Section 702, the U.S. government can collect the electronic communications of foreign nationals abroad without an individual warrant for each target. It also allows agencies like the National Security Agency and the FBI to compel U.S. telecommunications providers to turn over data, including emails, text messages and phone calls.
But when the government surveils a foreign target, it inevitably sweeps up the communications of any American on the other end of those conversations too. The government calls this “incidental collection.” Critics call it what it is: a back door into Americans’ private lives. Your email to a colleague abroad, your phone call or text to a family member overseas, all of it can be collected and searched without a warrant.
According to a recently declassified report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI increased its backdoor searches on Americans in 2025 by 34% from the previous year, to more than 7,400 searches.
The government will tell you that the FISA Court provides oversight. But it’s important to understand what that oversight looks like.
The FISA Court does not approve individual targets one by one, the way a normal warrant works. It approves broad categories, things like “international terrorism” or “foreign governments,” for one year at a time, granting a blanket approval covering potentially hundreds of thousands of targets.
According to one government report, queries involving terms related to certain “organizations or groups, such as political, media, and religious organizations or individuals prominent in such organizations … have increased from 227 in 2024, to 839 in 2025.” The same report found that the FBI has searched communications tied to Black Lives Matter protesters, members of Congress, congressional staff, journalists, political commentators and even campaign donors.
The justification has always been “national security.” And for years, the response to critics has been “If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”
But that thinking has always been wrong. Because once you allow one violation against a group, you lower the bar for everyone.
Right now, there is a regime in power that has repeatedly sicced federal powers on journalists, protesters and critics — an administration whose own officials describe perceived political opponents as the “enemies within.”
We don’t have to wonder what happens when a government like that is handed a tool like this. President Donald Trump himself answered that question for us, writing on Truth Social that he was “willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen” for national security.
And yet, just two years ago, this same president told fellow lawmakers to “KILL FISA,” accusing the FBI of misusing the law to spy on his 2016 presidential campaign. He was right to be alarmed then. But his objection was never to the weapon; it was to who was pulling the trigger.
He is not alone in that reversal.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee, spent years as one of Section 702’s most vocal critics. He routinely cited a 2023 government report finding that the government had misused the program 278,000 times. Just last April, he wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post warning, “Until we pass a warrant requirement, the government’s powerful surveillance authorities will always be subject to abuse.”
But then Jordan flipped. His motive is not hard to find: If Republicans lose the House, Mike Johnson is likely finished as speaker, and the next Republican leader will need Trump’s backing. Jordan tried for the speakership in 2023 and failed spectacularly. By dropping his opposition to this bill now, he has a clearer path to the top than he has ever had: minority leader if Republicans lose the House, the speakership itself if they keep it.
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Jordan’s reversal comes at a moment when the stakes for civil liberties have never been higher, because Section 702 of the FISA Act no longer exists in isolation. Alongside it is a commercial data pipeline, where the government can simply purchase Americans’ sensitive data, sidestepping the Fourth Amendment altogether. Then there is the growing arsenal of artificial intelligence systems capable of analyzing that data at a scale no human ever could.
Taken together, this is a new beast entirely: a surveillance apparatus no previous generation of Americans would recognize as compatible with the Bill of Rights.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., warned that AI could allow the government to process vast amounts of data to identify Americans for warrantless searches. His conclusion: “New tools require new rules.” But so far, Congress has written none.
There is a simple reform on the table: a warrant requirement — a traditional, individualized warrant, signed by a judge and backed by probable cause. Such a requirement would mean the government could no longer go into its Section 702 database and search for a specific American’s communications without first obtaining a judge-issued warrant backed by probable cause.
That’s the standard that has governed searches in this country for over two centuries, enshrined in the very text of the Fourth Amendment: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause.”
Once you allow one violation against one group, you lower the bar for everyone.
Applying the Constitution is not a radical notion. And yet Johnson has refused to allow a vote on the warrant requirement, twice trying to ram through his own version of the bill, which lacks this requirement and does nothing to curb backdoor searches of Americans’ data. He ultimately succeeded, pushing it through the House last week with the help of 42 Democrats.
The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, defended that vote, claiming the choice was binary: either reauthorize the program or let it expire entirely. But that’s simply not true. The law would not have lapsed. Surveillance could have continued uninterrupted through March 2027, because it operates through annual certifications from a special federal court.
What would have changed is the government’s ability to add new targets. Without explicit statutory authorization, companies could refuse, courts could get involved, and real accountability would be on the table. Meaning there was no real emergency. There was time to negotiate real reforms; lawmakers simply chose not to.
And that brings us back to the original sin of the post-9/11 surveillance era: that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. The question was never really about whether you have something to hide. It has always been who decides what counts as suspicious.
Author George Orwell understood something about surveillance that Congress apparently does not (or pretends not to). In his novel “1984,” Orwell described a totalitarian world where “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” Everything else — what you said, what you wrote, who you called — belonged in some sense to the state.
And now how far are we, really, from the world he described?
Your emails are collected. Your texts are collected. Your calls are collected. Your face is collected, scanned and stored by surveillance systems already deployed by this administration. They sit in a federal database, searchable without a warrant, by an administration that has already told you who it considers an enemy.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.
Amel Ahmed
Amel Ahmed is a Segment Producer for "Velshi."