Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Congress Extends Section 702 Spy Program 45 Days

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 30, 2026

The surveillance program that scoops up Americans’ communications without warrants got another 45 days of life on Thursday, after Congress reauthorized a clean version of FISA Section 702 hours before it was set to expire.

The House voted 261-111 to push the program’s expiration to June 21, sending the legislation to President Trump’s desk before the midnight deadline.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, “This will allow additional time to do that,” referring to ongoing work on a longer-term reauthorization that the upper chamber has been drafting separately.

What the procedural language obscures is what Section 702 actually does. The statute lets the NSA harvest communications from foreign targets without warrants, then stores those communications in a database that intelligence agencies can later search for information about Americans.

The agency calls this incidental collection but it functions as a workaround for the Fourth Amendment, allowing the government to access Americans’ messages, calls, and emails by claiming the foreigner on the other end of the conversation was the real target.

The renewal arrived only after a messy week of legislative whiplash. The House had originally passed a three-year extension on April 29, attaching an unrelated provision to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency.

Senate leadership killed that version on arrival, then jammed the lower chamber with a stripped-down 45-day extension that contained no privacy reforms, no warrant requirement, and no concession to the lawmakers who have spent years documenting how the program gets misused.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion at the heart of Thursday’s fight is the closest thing to a smoking gun the public has seen on Section 702 in years.

The ruling addresses searches of Americans’ communications inside the NSA’s foreign intelligence database, the same backdoor query practice that has been flagged repeatedly by oversight bodies.

The court found problems with how the government has been running these searches.

What problems, specifically, remain classified.

That is the document Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has spent over a decade trying to force daylight onto NSA programs, wanted Americans to read before Congress voted on a multi-year extension.

Wyden initially refused consent for the 45-day deal, holding out until Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and ranking Democrat Mark Warner agreed to send a letter asking the executive branch to declassify the opinion within 15 days.

On the floor, Wyden made the case for why the secrecy is the problem. “That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” he said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Cotton, an unwavering supporter of the program, took the framing personally. “I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”

Cotton runs the committee that controls intelligence community oversight, and the speech or debate clause of the Constitution is the only thing protecting senators from prosecution for what they say on the floor.

Stripped of theatrics, the message from the chairman of the body that supposedly checks the surveillance state was that pointing out documented abuses is itself a punishable act.

The result of all this is also that a surveillance program with documented constitutional problems gets six additional weeks of operation while the ruling describing those problems stays buried.

Current law already requires the FISC opinion to be released to the public eventually. Wyden wants that timeline accelerated to before Congress votes on a multi-year reauthorization, on the reasonable theory that lawmakers should know what they are voting to renew.

“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” Wyden said.

What happens next depends on whether the executive branch honors the declassification request, and whether the Senate’s three-year reauthorization includes anything resembling meaningful reform.

The version that has been moving through committee does not require warrants for searches of Americans’ communications. It does not narrow the categories of foreign intelligence that can justify surveillance or impose meaningful limits on how long the NSA can retain the communications it collects.

The program scheduled for renewal on June 21 is not the program Congress originally approved.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Comments Off on Congress Extends Section 702 Spy Program 45 Days

Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech

By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to free speech. This right has long differentiated the United States from other Western nations like the United Kingdom and Canada where laws against so-called “hate speech” laws exist and are enforced.

Thankfully, America is different. In our country, even alleged hate speech is protected speech to ensure democratic principles and debate.

In a 1929 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Constitution secured “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts said in a ruling that the First Amendment serves “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

This constitutional protection has been increasingly threatened recently, particularly by pro-Israeli forces that have tried to frame any criticism of that government as “anti-Semitism” and thus hate speech punishable by law. This has included everything from arrests, to squashing campus debate to buying TikTok to an attempt to cover up human rights absuses in Gaza. President Donald Trump has even issued executive orders that use vague definitions of what constitutes “anti-Semitism” that comes with criminal penalties.

Mark Levin is an American-born Zionist radio host who is an outspoken advocate for Israel’s government, regularly calling anyone who criticizes the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflict in Gaza “Nazis.”

Toward this agenda, Levin recently appeared to not agree with his own country’s free speech rights. On his latest Sunday Fox News program, unironically called Life, Liberty and Levin, the neoconservative pundit explained why free speech liberties in the U.S. have gone too far.

Seemingly worried that certain speech is protected in the United States, Levin said in the wake of the Secret Service taking down a shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Friday, “First time things like this have happened, but it really is problematic because so much of it is protected.”

“And you hear people say, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Levin said. “They don’t even know what the First Amendment believes.”

Certain “speech” is “problematic” because “so much of it is protected.” You could see where this was headed.

Levin then explained what he believes “the First Amendment believes.” “Do you want to de-platform people?” he ranted. “You know, the libs do that. I don’t have any problem with de-platforming Nazis or jihadis.”

“Nazis,” Levin says. Levin uses this term loosely, all the time, and that’s putting it mildly.

Prominent libertarian personality Josie Glabach, known most popularly as “The Libertarian Redhead,” made a telling list of the many people and groups Levin has called Nazis since 2024:

  • The Democrats
  • The Democrat media
  • An Australian bakery
  • The Pakistani defense minister
  • Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton
  • The entire Libertarian Party
  • College students
  • MMA fighter Jake Shields
  • Nick Fuentes
  • Putin’s buddies
  • Influencer Dan Bilzarian
  • The Houthis
  • Comedian and libertarian personality Dave Smith
  • Anyone who associates with Dave Smith
  • Tucker Carlson
  • Beirut
  • Hezbollah
  • A veteran who asked Mark to be more tolerant
  • Influencer Myron Gaines
  • The city of London
  • Hamas
  • The New York Times
  • New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
  • A New York Times correspondent
  • Terrorists;
  • The “woke reich”
  • Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner
  • The United Nations
  • Harvard University
  • The city of Amsterdam
  • Columbia University students
  • Iterations of the “Iranian Nazi regime,” the “Islamic Nazi regime,” the “Islamo Nazi regime,” the “Islamist Nazi regime,” and “All of Iran (the new Nazis)”
  • The Ayatollah (presumably of Iran)
  • Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
  • A protestor on a subway
  • Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
  • President Joe Biden’s entire State Department
  • Turkish Preisdent Recep Erdoğan
  • College basketball analyst Bruce Pearl
  • Certain Arab, liberals and journalists
  • Reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro
  • ISIS
  • Seventeen random Twitter users

This eclectic group of entities great and small, many of whom are regular critics of Israel’s government, are “Nazis” in Levin’s view. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods succinctly put it, “Nazis’ includes everyone who mocks Levin.”

Levin continued his Sunday rant against “Nazis”:

“I don’t have any problem with de-platforming them. What does that mean, de-platforming them? A government law? No. It means that X or Twitter or Facebook or Amazon with Twitch and someone says you know what? You’re a low life we’re not paying, you know, get off our platform. What’s wrong with that?”

The neocon pundit appeared to say that private platforms should police speech according to the political views of Mark Levin. He is right that this is no violation of the First Amendment. Private companies can allow or restrict speech as they please. “It’s called private enterprise,” he said. “I got no problem with that.”

Then Levin basically said such speech was no different than pornography, which is not protected under the First Amendment. Levin continued, “I mean, what if they have this horrific pornography on? Is that okay? No, it’s not okay.”

“Because our kids have access to it,” he said. “People who are impressionable have access to it. “What if they had people screaming at the top of the lungs saying, assassinate this guy and assassinate that guy? Well, they shouldn’t do that.”

“Why? What’s the standard?” Levin went on. “You need to have a standard. What should the law be? What does the Constitution say?”

The Constitution says that all speech is protected, but “true threats” and obscenity are not.

But political opinions about Israel that go against Levin’s views are protected, whether he likes it or not.

That’s when Levin basically outright said that speech that criticizes Israel should be forbidden just like pornography. “I just think we’ve taken this too far because we’re not even talking about political speech, which is the most protected of all speech,” Levin said.

“We do limit speech,” he insisted. “We limit speech, pornography. We limit speech.”

What Levin, like so many other Zionists, truly want is for the First Amendment to be amended itself. They believe, whether they say it forthright or not (and Levin appears to be doing just that), that this legal provision designed by the Founders precisely to protect political speech should no longer protect speech that is critical of Israel’s government.

Americans have historically valued their free speech. American Zionists like Levin now want a carve out.

But the free speech guarantee enshrined in the United States’s governing charter is so integral to the American experience, to gut it for any reason would be to drastically alter the DNA of the soon to be 250-year-old country.

As an American, Mark Levin doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing just that—all in the service of a foreign country.

It might be better for Americans to instead wish other nations well, yet solely concentrate on our own affairs at home, and perhaps just as important, to stop listening to American pundits whose primary allegiance seems to be countries other than their own.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech