A gunfire exchange between an armed man and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday came just days before a deadline to renew sweeping surveillance authority. President Donald Trump used the incident to argue the FBI should be allowed broader warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire this week.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Trump said he was “willing to give up [his] security” to keep Section 702 in place and suggested Americans should accept similar trade-offs “for the safety of our nation.” The program authorizes U.S. intelligence agencies to collect the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant; because those targets often communicate with people in the U.S., the collection can capture emails, texts and calls of American persons.
Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich asked whether it was known if the suspect, identified as Cole Tomas Allen, had been radicalized by foreign actors and whether the shooting highlighted “the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats.” Trump cited past uses of FISA, complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA authority to obtain warrants against a former Trump aide during the Russia probe and saying the tool had been used against Iran and in matters related to Venezuela. “It’s really needed for national security,” he said, adding that he would accept risks to his own safety for the perceived greater good of national security.
Privacy advocates and some researchers say the public record tying Section 702 directly to thwarted attacks is limited. Jordan Liz, an associate philosophy professor at San José State University, noted that while officials often assert Section 702 has disrupted many terror plots, publicly documented examples are scarce. One well-known case is the 2009 New York subway bombing plot: the NSA tracked a communication between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi and passed that intelligence to the FBI, which disrupted the plot. But reports say the NSA obtained the courier’s foreign email address from British intelligence, illustrating the role of allied information-sharing rather than proving Section 702’s unique centrality.
Authorities currently believe the White House dinner suspect acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he communicated with foreign entities. A document he wrote referenced his Christian beliefs and mentioned U.S. detention of migrants, boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.
Trump has been actively pushing reauthorization of Section 702. The program was reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two separate bids to extend it—one for 18 months and another for five years—failed amid objections over a lack of privacy reforms and a loophole allowing data brokers to sell Americans’ information to government agencies without judicial approval.
After those efforts stalled, House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years, require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans’ data to an oversight official, and add penalties for abuse. Privacy advocates called the measures inadequate. The House Rules Committee was scheduled to consider moving the bill to a floor vote.
Rep. Jamie Raskin circulated a memo urging colleagues to reject the proposal, arguing it “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data… FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge.”
Earlier this month four House Democrats—Josh Gottheimer, Tom Suozzi, Marie Gluesencamp Perez and Jared Golden—broke with their party to support a procedural vote advancing reauthorization. Privacy organizations are now pressuring those members to oppose the latest extension.
“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept. “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”
(Reporting originally published by Common Dreams.)
