Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process.
The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for months now—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus on a longer reauthorization could be reached.
EFF has said for decades, every time this program is up for renewal: “Section 702 should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans.” If not, we should let the whole thing expire. And this time, it has, at least for a little while.
Ironically, we have Bill Pulte to thank for this (probably temporary) reprieve. Earlier this month, Trump on Tuesday named Pulte – currently director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – to replace current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation last month. As has been widely reported, Pulte lacks any intelligence, military, or congressional experience. Senate Democrats responded by refusing to move forward with their version of a bill to reauthorize Section 702. Similarly, the House refused to approve even a short-term renewal of the program.
However, the potential for abuse of this program is not limited to one individual or one administration. And if Congress is this concerned about one particular individual having access to Americans’ most sensitive information, the responsible thing to do is to put more transparency, accountability, and oversight into the structure of this program.
Members on both sides of the aisle understand this. As we have seen several times this year already, the appetite for reform is stronger than ever. We hope to continue to see strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to renewing Section 702 without a warrant requirement for backdoor searches. Until then, the authority for this program should remain expired.
Editor’s note, August 2026 — why we are less cheerful than the headline
This section is ours, not EFF’s, and was not part of the original article.
Collection did not stop on 12 June. This is the part almost every write-up of the lapse left out, including ours until we checked. Certifications approved by the FISA Court before the expiry remain valid for their full term, and the certifications signed off in March 2026 run to March 2027. So the authority to start new collection lapsed; the collection already authorised continued. “Section 702 expired” and “Section 702 surveillance stopped” are different sentences, and only the first is true.
We corrected our own Why sovereignty page for exactly this on 8 August 2026. It had described 702 in the present tense, citing the 2024 reauthorisation, which was stale — but replacing that with a flat “it expired” would have been the opposite error.
And none of it touches the CLOUD Act. If you are choosing a host, 702 was never the law that mattered most to you. 702 is about intelligence collection; the CLOUD Act is about a US company being compelled to produce data it holds, wherever in the world that data physically sits. It has no sunset clause, it has never expired, and nothing about June 2026 changed it. A European company hosting on a US-owned platform is in the same position today as it was in May.
That is why we sell on ownership rather than on datacentre location, and why we would rather publish the sceptical footnote to good news than let a headline do work our argument has not earned. If 702 had been the whole problem, its lapse would have been a reason to worry less. It was not, so it is not.
Source: Victory! 702 has Expired! by India McKinney, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 12 June 2026. Republished unaltered under CC BY 4.0; the editor’s note above is ours.