Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast, your source for policy rants and raves from Tech Freedom,

your Washington, D.C. advocate for the freedom to tinker and innovate. I'm Evan Schwarzenstacher,

your host. On today's show, spying on foreigners, should our foreign surveillance practices

be reformed? And in a world where data flows from country to country so seamlessly, is it even

possible to only spy on foreigners and not also spy on your own citizens? And is our oversight of these

programs sufficient? Joining me in our DC studio to discuss this is Nathan Leamer, a policy analyst at the R Street Institute.

Nathan, thank you for joining me.

Hi, thanks for having me.

So when we talk about foreign surveillance these days, what we're really talking about is Section 702.

And the original FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that was passed in 1978, but then after

9-11, it was reformed in 2008 to give the government more authority, the FISA Amendments Act.

So, Nathan, what is Section 702, and why are we talking about this?

Yeah, so Section 702 and Section 215 have been recently discussed a lot in terms of spying

and surveillance questions.

Section 215, which usually refers to domestic mass surveillance of telephone records, which

we address in the USA Freedom Act this past year.

But Section 702 is dealing with the mass surveillance and collection of data for foreign targets.

Usually looking at people who we suspect outside of the U.S. are committing terrorism or

involved in terrible acts, if you will, harming our country.

But the problem is that a lot of these programs inadvertently or maybe even

on purpose collect the data of innocent Americans, millions of innocent Americans, and

it's not just our phone records, it's text messages, it's internet correspondence, it's our search

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