Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez at Cover Politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress.

And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And today feel special because Eric, you're back. It's been a while since you've been on the pod. It's very nice to have you.

I'm glad to be back. Today on the show, Congress has tried and failed and tried and failed to renew a key spy tool program.

That's because some lawmakers worry that it is used by the FBI to review Americans' private calls, texts, and emails without a warrant.

Before we get into this, I want to have you both explain, though, what is this program and what is it supposed to be used for?

All right.

I can kick this off.

So we're talking about Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

And what it does is it allows the government to collect for foreign intelligence purposes, the emails, text messages, phone calls of foreigners overseas, even when they're talking to Americans. And they can do all of this, as you mentioned at the top, without a warrant.

So it's a key tool people in national security circles say, people in the intelligence community say it allows the government to learn a lot about what foreign adversaries are doing, what hackers are doing,

what cartels are doing, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea. And they say that this is really a critical

tool. And without it, former Attorney General Merrick Garland said at one point when he was

testifying in a previous iteration of this, that if the U.S. were not to have 702 anymore, it would be like intentionally blinding

ourselves. That's kind of how he put it.

It is hard to overstate the scale of this. In recent years, it's been something like 350,000

intelligence targets annually. And that's not just the communications they're pulling in.

That's the number of people, group, et cetera,

they're pulling in. So this goes into a giant database of information that the intelligence

community and that federal law enforcement, i.e. the FBI, can look into. And the controversial part

is that sometimes people located abroad, talk to U.S. citizens located abroad, or Americans or others located inside of the United States. And that's where a lot of this controversy comes from.

Yeah. Well, it sounds like, Ryan, this has been around for a while. So I wonder if we do have some examples in history of how this has been used in the past and what we can draw from like how the government has used this program.

So there are examples, but it also has to be said that traditionally the government doesn't want to

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