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Senate-floor speech urges amendments to BRIDAL, calls claims that FISA §702 will 'end' misleading
Summary
An unidentified Senate floor speaker criticized the House-passed BRIDAL (Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act), argued that recent FISC recertification keeps §702 collection operational for another year, and urged amendments — including a warrant requirement for U.S. person queries and stronger FISC amicus and exculpatory-evidence rules.
An unidentified Senate-floor speaker urged colleagues not to rush to pass the House bill known in the speech as BRIDAL (Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act), arguing on the floor that the bill’s reforms are largely illusory and that statutory §702 foreign-intelligence collection will not abruptly stop if Congress delays action.
The speaker said that much of §702 is designed to gather intelligence on foreign targets abroad and that some U.S. persons’ communications are "incidentally collected" in that process. But the speaker emphasized a separate legal question — whether querying stored §702 data for a specific U.S. person raises Fourth Amendment protections — remains unsettled in federal courts and therefore warrants careful legislative scrutiny. "Querying the stored data does have important Fourth Amendment implications," the speaker said in a direct citation to what they described as a Second Circuit ruling.
The lawmaker disputed repeated characterizations on the floor that courts have definitively concluded there is no…
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