WASHINGTON—Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii, who is President-elect Donald Trump’s intended nominee to serve as director of national intelligence, announced on Jan. 10 that she supports reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—a controversial statute criticized by both progressives and conservatives that she previously opposed.
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.
