Attacks on Privacy:

A Tragedy in 3 Acts and Why it Matters to Activists

On April 29, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a three-year reauthorization of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Section 702, by a vote of 235 to 191, advancing the bill to the Senate. The legislation extends the government’s warrantless surveillance authority to collect foreign intelligence from non-U.S. citizens who are outside of the United States. Privacy advocates and some lawmakers demanded that a provision requiring a warrant for U.S. person queries be added. Although Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called the House FISA bill “dead on arrival,” on April 30, the Senate passed a late night 45-day extension of the law. Click here for more.

But why should CLDC readers care?  This is another example of Know Your History — U.S. spy powers play a critical role in repression and imperialism in the U.S. and around the globe.

First, what the hell is FISA? 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has for over half a century been a guardrail setting limits on the extent of the government’s ability to engage in domestic spying. The history of FISA can be told as a tragedy in three acts.

ACT I: It’s 1975. Nixon has fallen and a new era of government accountability has begun. The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, aka The Church Committee, is formed to conduct a post-Watergate review of questionable government surveillance practices. Everyone’s suit lapels are cartoonishly wide and… laptops and cellphones don’t exist!

The Church Committee uncovered everything from MKULTRA to COINTELPRO, and an NSA mass surveillance program done 70’s-style using old-school phone lines. Groovy! Operation Mockingbird was allegedly deployed to influence the media. The list goes on, and you’ve likely seen the movie version of all these tales as they’ve woven themselves into the culture. Without the Church Committee, we would never have had The X-Files.

The Church Committee produced a report, which included a very important recommendation — form a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court capable of secretly reviewing the constitutionality of government surveillance requests as a safeguard against overreach. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed in 1978.

ACT II: It’s 2001. The twin towers have fallen and a new era of American life has begun, exchanging privacy for the promise of security. The USA PATRIOT Act barnstorms its way through the halls of power, the only vote against it in the Senate cast by a lonely Russ Feingold (D-WI). The Patriot Act removed the warrant requirement for some government searches of individual Americans, and so began the program of mass NSA data collection. In the aftermath of the passage of the Patriot Act, attorney Lauren Regan traveled around the U.S. speaking about the grave civil rights erosions that had just been passed by Congress, and CLDC was officially founded.

The 16-year period comprising the W. Bush and then Obama administrations saw the use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court metastasize into a rubber-stamp machine for government surveillance requests. What was designed as an institutional safeguard against government overreach withered into a fig leaf too small to conceal the massive surveillance state. A series of leaks revealed the government’s surveillance programs to the public, but despite the outrage, FISA was renewed for years.

ACT III: It’s 2026. You are here. The compound crises of Trump, COVID, and then Trump again have left what remained of governmental oversight measures hollow and ineffectual. The Supreme Court has abandoned all pretense of neutrality and absconds from its role as a check and balance to the executive branch. And of course, surveillance technology has wildly expanded and developed since 1978. No one is minding the store; no one is steering the oversight ship. The refusal to reform or bring meaningful accountability to government spying programs have left them intact, dangerous and readily accessed, like a loaded gun laying in a crib.

NSPM-7 and FISA

Early in his second term, Trump released a National Security Policy Memo, the seventh ever put out by any president. NSPM-7 cleanly lays out the same bleating litany of fascist grievances everyone has heard ad nauseum. Lessor players in the expanded MAGA cinematic universe like Brett Kavanaugh and Charlie Kirk are name dropped in the memo. This table setting strikes an unambiguous tone and clearly identifies “good guys” (pro-Christian, “traditional Americans”) and “bad guys” (pro-LGBT+ “non-traditional” anti-fascists). It then gives broad policy direction to governmental agencies about where and how to prioritize their enforcement efforts in order to criminally target people for their political beliefs.

NSPM-7 is not a law or regulation. On its own it has no force or effect. It was loudly opposed when it was issued. Now that seven months have passed since its issuance, the implementation of NSPM-7’s priorities are beginning to take shape within the Department of Justice’s prosecutorial plans. The government is, once again, engaging in the practice of mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, targeted for their political beliefs. And FISA is implicated as a major means to astro-turf due process over the hard surface of the police state.

Example 1: StopICE.net

In 2025, CLDC represented Sherman Austin in his fight against an ICE subpoena for running an amazing community resource called stopice.net. Sherman was targeted along with several others for publicizing anti-ICE demonstrations in the Los Angeles area. ICE used an administrative subpoena to Meta (Instagram), seeking to unmask Sherman’s identity and obtain all his private communications. Sherman, who voluntarily unmasked himself in order to better expose this act of repression, has a long history as a political activist. While he was alarmed to have been targeted for such clearly constitutional speech, he was not totally surprised to have been the subject of a government investigation, given his movement history.

Had CLDC, ACLU NorCal, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other partner organizations not stepped in with motions to quash for several targeted accounts, Meta would likely have turned over all government-requested private user information automatically. Once the government realized it was facing lawyers, legal challenges, and a real fight, they immediately dropped everything.

What was that about? While no one can (or should) get in the mind of the government, it is fair to draw reasonable inferences from the facts we know. We know ICE was conducting some form of surveillance of internet speech that led them to identify these accounts. We know the government sought extensive records related to their personal communications and data, exactly what you would be looking for if you were building some form of database. We know the targets have never been charged with a crime or accused of any form of wrong-doing. From this it is fair to conclude that the government is using the pretense of a criminal investigation to perform targeted surveillance against Americans for their political speech, perhaps for the purpose of building a secret database or list. It is not even an original scheme; it is based on the blueprint of what the NSA did under FISA during the Obama administration.

For Sherman and the others, the legal chill ended with the government’s withdrawal of the subpoenas. CLDC and our partners prevailed and, for the moment, the government has not attempted to reissue another subpoena. But that victory is only for those who lawyered up and went to federal court to stop the government exploit. Anyone who was the subject of a targeted subpoena and didn’t put up a legal fight in federal court probably had their information disclosed to ICE. There is no way to know to the extent of the operation at this time.

Example 2: The Reddit Grand Jury Investigation.

In 2026, CLDC intervened in a second ICE subpoena fight, this time on behalf of J. Doe, the anonymous operator of a Reddit account. Unlike Sherman, who had a visible and political  public persona, J. Doe is by comparison only peripherally involved in the opposition to ICE enforcement. Their activism is primarily limited to petitioning on environmental issues and posting snarky things about ICE in a coarse, pithy way on the Reddit forum r/behindthebastards. ICE’s focus on J. Doe’s online comments and low-key political engagement on immigration issues is disturbing — if Doe was targeted for their speech, then literally anyone posting criticism or dissent of the government and its policies could fall within this net.

This time an “administrative summons” was issued out of the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) office in Virginia and sought the same broad set of personal information as in Sherman Austin’s case. And, as in Sherman’s case, once CLDC filed a federal motion challenging the government’s request regarding J. Doe, the U.S. Attorney’s office immediately withdrew it. This is where the similarities between the two cases end. First, the “summons” was issued under the authority of a wildly irrelevant statute that allows review of records regarding imports and exports. And second, in J. Doe’s case, 24 hours after CLDC told the court we were withdrawing the motion to quash based on the government’s withdrawal of the summons, Reddit received a federal grand jury subpoena demanding even more private information about our client. The Washington, D.C., grand jury proceedings are overseen by newly-minted U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro. Readers may recall that Pirro was one of the named defendants in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which eventually settled for hundreds of millions of dollars and had to admit Pirro’s and other Fox hosts had lied about alleged problems with voting machines. As U.S. Attorney, she has now made a shameful record of pursuing groundless charges that don’t stick.

Again, it is fair to draw inferences from this set of facts. Because a federal D.C. grand jury subpoena was issued to Reddit regarding our client 24 hours after the prior summons litigation was dismissed in federal court in California, we can conclude there is coordination between ICE and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office regarding an investigation related to Americans’ online speech. This observable instance of inter-agency coordination is perfectly consistent with NSPM-7’s directive to target anti-fascists and/or “anti-Americans,” and is being implemented in the classic style of the second Trump era — sloppy and poorly thought out. But authoritarianism doesn’t have to be a work of precision or genius to be effective in censoring speech and chilling dissent. Standing up and resisting such tactics continues to be a duty of progressive political activists, and CLDC has your back in that fight.

FISA Renewal and What Comes Next

The inter-agency nature of the effort to disgorge J. Doe’s personal information is highly concerning, especially in light of the vote to reauthorize FISA for another 45 days in order to try to line up support for what has become a deeply unpopular spying bill. Surely the DC prosecutors aren’t the only agency coordinating with ICE. Undoubtedly the NSA is involved at a minimum. If FISA is reauthorized, it means the present status quo continues without meaningful oversight or accountability. If FISA is not reauthorized, it would mean increased civil liberties protections for everyone through the elimination of carveouts to constitutional protections created by the act.

The renewal comes at a time when the Trump administration would very much prefer to keep FISA alive for obvious authoritarian reasons. Opposing the reauthorization of FISA would require a principled, coordinated effort, and that should leave everyone concerned.

Whatever the future of FISA, the government’s objectives at present remain the same. The talk is big on their part, the rhetoric harsh. But they are not the all-seeing, all-powerful force Stephen Miller clearly feels they are. The implementation of the spying campaigns that are coming to light reveal they are targeting people for legal activity criticizing the government. While this clearly chills speech and is outrageous in its own right, it is also ineffectual. Sherman Austin and J. Doe show us that being targeted for your principles doesn’t force you to abandon them. If anything, standing up and fighting back as robustly as possible has shown itself to be an effective tactic not just for defending the people targeted, but to attack the legitimacy of the investigations in court.

J. Doe’s matter is still pending before the U.S. District Court for DC in a secret grand jury challenge that has been placed “under seal” by the court. The outcome will yield further information about the government’s methods and tactics when it comes to domestic surveillance. Until then, pay attention to the outcome of the FISA reauthorization vote, as that will likely have a major influence on the scale and shape of government spying.