# Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act **The 1978 statute that put national-security wiretapping inside the United States under a court for the first time.** Signed by [[Jimmy Carter]] on October 25, 1978 (Public Law 95-511), after passing the Senate 95–1 and the House 246–128, FISA is the parent law of everything the vault tracks under surveillance authority: the [[FISA Court]], the individual "FISA warrant" that targeted [[Carter Page]], and — added thirty years later as Title VII — [[FISA Section 702]]. FISA is often used loosely to mean Section 702. They are not the same thing, and the difference became concrete in June 2026: **when Section 702 lapsed on June 12, 2026, FISA did not.** Only Title VII sunsets. The traditional individualized-warrant authorities in Titles I and III have no expiration date and kept running. ## Origins FISA is the main statutory product of the post-[[Watergate Scandal]] intelligence reckoning. The [[Church Committee]] documented decades of warrantless wiretapping of civil-rights leaders, antiwar activists and journalists under [[Richard Nixon]] and his predecessors, all justified as inherent presidential power over national security. [[Ted Kennedy]] introduced the bill as S. 1566 in May 1977. The bargain it struck: the executive keeps its foreign-intelligence surveillance power, but inside the United States it must get an order from a special court, on a showing of probable cause that the target is **a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power**. ## Structure | Title | Authority | Sunset? | |---|---|---| | **Title I** | Electronic surveillance by individual court order (the classic "FISA warrant") | Permanent | | **Title III** | Physical searches by individual court order | Permanent | | **Title IV** | Pen registers and trap-and-trace devices | Permanent | | **Title V** | Business records (the provision [[USA PATRIOT Act]] Section 215 expanded) | Section 215's expansion expired March 2020 | | **Title VII** | Programmatic collection on non-U.S. persons abroad ([[FISA Section 702]]) plus Sections 703–704 on U.S. persons abroad — added by the [[FISA Amendments Act]] of 2008 | **Lapsed June 12, 2026** | | **Title VIII** | Retroactive legal immunity for companies that assisted the government — added in 2008 | Permanent | The court itself has eleven district judges, each designated by the Chief Justice for a seven-year term, with a three-judge Court of Review above it. See [[FISA Court]] for how that court works and how its record is read. ## How the statute has been stretched FISA has been amended far more often than it has been reformed: - **2001** — the [[USA PATRIOT Act]] lowered the "primary purpose" standard to "significant purpose" and created the Section 215 business-records power. - **2001–2007** — the [[Stellar Wind]] program ran outside FISA entirely on presidential authority. - **2007–2008** — the Protect America Act and then the [[FISA Amendments Act]] wrote much of that program into law as Section 702 and immunized the telecoms. - **2015** — the [[USA FREEDOM Act]] ended bulk phone-records collection and gave the court amici. - **2024** — the [[Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act]] renewed Title VII for two years and widened who can be compelled to help. Much of what the [[NSA]] collects never touches FISA at all: collection overseas runs under [[Executive Order 12333]], which no court reviews. ## KB significance **The two FISAs in right-wing discourse.** The movement's "FISA abuse" story is about Title I — the [[Crossfire Hurricane]] warrant on Carter Page, which the [[Inspector General]] found riddled with errors, and the altered email to which FBI lawyer [[Kevin Clinesmith]] pleaded guilty. The civil-liberties case against Section 702 is about Title VII — warrantless "backdoor searches" of Americans' communications. These are different legal authorities with different failure modes. Collapsing them into one word lets a politician attack "FISA" as a weapon used against Trump while voting to keep the program that touches far more Americans. **The surviving core.** The June 2026 lapse is a test case for the hawks' "going dark" warnings: Titles I and III still let the government seek an individual order against any foreign agent it can name, which is the argument reformers make for why a 702 lapse is not an intelligence blackout. ## See Also - [[FISA Section 702]] — Title VII's programmatic authority, and the 2026 lapse - [[FISA Section 702 Renewal 2026]] — how the lapse happened - [[FISA Court]] — the court the statute created - [[Church Committee]] and [[Church Committee Hearings (1975)]] — the investigations that produced it - [[Intelligence Oversight Architecture]] — where FISA sits among the post-1975 oversight bodies - [[Surveillance State]] — the wider apparatus