Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sits inside Title VII of that Act, and Title VII has never been permanent. It was created in 2008 with a repeal clause attached - Section 403(b) of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 - and everything that has happened since is a story about that one clause and the date written into it. This page tracks every date it has carried, the law that put each one there, and when that law was enacted.

Background: what Section 702 is

Section 702 is codified at 50 U.S.C. 1881a. It lets the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence jointly authorize, for up to one year at a time, the targeting of people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information. The statute says in terms that nothing in FISA's traditional surveillance procedures requires an application for a court order for an acquisition targeted under this section at a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States. To carry the acquisition out, those two officials may direct an electronic communication service provider, in writing, to immediately provide the Government with all information, facilities, or assistance necessary.

Six limits sit on that authority. An acquisition may not intentionally target anyone known at the time to be located in the United States; may not target a person abroad when the purpose is to get at a particular known person in the United States; may not intentionally target a U.S. person abroad; may not intentionally acquire a communication whose sender and all intended recipients are known to be in the United States; may not intentionally acquire communications that contain a reference to, but are not to or from, a target; and must be conducted consistently with the Fourth Amendment.

The recurring fight is about what happens to the data afterwards. The statute devotes a subsection to queries. The Attorney General must adopt querying procedures for information collected under Section 702 and must ensure they keep a record of every United States person query term used. Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel must get prior approval from a supervisor or an authorized attorney before running a U.S. person query term against unminimized Section 702 material, unless they reasonably believe the query could help mitigate a threat to life or serious bodily harm. FBI queries solely designed to find and extract evidence of criminal activity are prohibited outright, subject to a threat-to-life exception of their own and a litigation-preservation exception. The agency those query rules are addressed to is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Neither the National Security Agency nor the Central Intelligence Agency is named anywhere in Section 702.

2008: the clause is written, with a 2012 date

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 became Public Law 110-261 on July 10, 2008. Its Section 403(b)(1) reads: "Except as provided in section 404, effective December 31, 2012, title VII of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, as amended by section 101(a), is repealed." The clause repeals the Title VII that the same Act had just written. A second paragraph applied the same date to a set of technical and conforming amendments, including one to the federal criminal wiretap statute.

That is four and a half years. The reverse-targeting limit that is often described as a later reform was in the Act from the start: the 2008 text already provided that an acquisition may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States.

Section 404 of the same Act carried transition procedures, including the rule that orders, authorizations and directives already issued under Title VII survive a repeal until they expire. It also carried over orders issued under Section 105B of FISA as added by the Protect America Act of 2007. That transition section is the reason a repeal of Title VII does not stop collection the moment it takes effect.

2012: December 31, 2012 becomes December 31, 2017

H.R. 5949, the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012, struck December 31, 2012 from both paragraphs of the clause and inserted December 31, 2017. Its only other provision was a conforming amendment changing the same date in the heading of Section 404(b)(1), the transition clause. The House passed it 301 to 118 on September 12, 2012 (Roll no. 569); the Senate passed it 73 to 23 on December 28, 2012 (Record Vote 236). It became Public Law 112-238 on December 30, 2012 - one day before the date it was replacing.

2017: a deferral rather than a new date

As December 31, 2017 approached, Congress did not amend the clause. Public Law 115-96, enacted December 22, 2017, instead provided that notwithstanding the dates specified in Section 403(b), the amendments made by that section would not take effect until the date specified in Section 106(3) of the Continuing Appropriations Act, 2018. The United States Code prints the effect of that provision as a temporary extension of the Section 403(b) effective date to January 19, 2018.

2018: December 31, 2023, and the querying subsection

S. 139, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act of 2017, became Public Law 115-118 on January 19, 2018 - the day the deferral ran out. Its Section 201(a) struck December 31, 2017 and inserted December 31, 2023.

Its Title I is where the substantive changes were. Section 101 is captioned "Querying procedures required" and is what inserted the querying subsection into Section 702 in the first place - the subsection that now carries the U.S. person query-term record and the FBI approval rules. Section 102, "Use and disclosure provisions", added a rule that information concerning a U.S. person acquired under Section 702 may not be used in evidence against that person in a criminal proceeding unless the FBI obtained an order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to access it, or the Attorney General makes a specified determination. Section 103 is captioned "Congressional review and oversight of abouts collection", and Section 104 required publication of Section 702 minimization procedures.

Two things this law is often said to have done, it did not. It did not create the reverse-targeting prohibition - that was in the 2008 Act. And the phrase "reverse targeting" appears nowhere in its text.

What Section 103 actually did was add the limit on acquiring communications that merely refer to a target - so-called abouts collection - together with an exception, and a congressional notice-and-review process governing any decision to resume that collection.

2023: December 31, 2023 becomes April 19, 2024

The next change did not arrive in a FISA bill. Section 7902 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, captioned "Extension of title VII of FISA", struck December 31, 2023 from both paragraphs and inserted April 19, 2024, and made the matching change to the Section 404(b)(1) heading. It became Public Law 118-31 on December 22, 2023, nine days before the date it replaced.

2024: a fixed date becomes a moving one

The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, H.R. 7888, struck April 19, 2024 from both paragraphs and inserted, in its place, "two years after the date of enactment of the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act" - converting the fixed deadline into one that ran from the new Act's own enactment. It made the matching change to the Section 404 transition clause. The House passed it 273 to 147 on April 12, 2024 (Roll no. 119); the Senate passed it 60 to 34 on April 19, 2024. It became Public Law 118-49 on April 20, 2024 - the day after the date it was replacing.

The same Act made the change that most affected who can be compelled. Its Section 25 added a new subparagraph to the definition of an electronic communication service provider, covering any other service provider with access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications, while carving out entities serving primarily as public accommodation facilities, dwellings, community facilities or food service establishments.

It also rewrote much of the querying subsection, required the FBI Director to issue minimum accountability standards, and required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to seek new court orders within 90 days of enactment. On abouts collection it went further than 2018: it struck the exception that had qualified the prohibition, and repealed the 2018 congressional notice-and-review process that had governed any resumption.

2026: two short extensions, then a stop

The two-year clock from April 20, 2024 ran out in April 2026. Four measures followed.

H.R. 8035 would have set a fixed repeal date of October 20, 2027. Its rule, H. Res. 1175, was rejected by the House 197 to 228 on April 17, 2026 (Roll no. 124), so the bill never reached a vote on passage.

H.R. 8322 became Public Law 119-84 on April 18, 2026. It struck the two-years-after trigger and inserted a fixed date: effective April 30, 2026, Title VII is repealed.

S. 4465 became Public Law 119-87 on April 30, 2026, striking April 30, 2026 and inserting June 12, 2026.

H.R. 9238 would have struck June 12, 2026 and inserted July 2, 2026. Taken up under a suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority, it was defeated 198 to 218 on June 11, 2026 (Roll no. 221) - short of two-thirds and short of a simple majority.

No further law was enacted before June 12, 2026, and Congress.gov's list of every law enacted in this Congress, refetched on September 1, 2026, records no law after Public Law 119-87 whose title names the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That list carries titles only, and the 2023 extension rode inside a defense authorization bill, so a title search is a floor rather than a guarantee. The 2026 measures are tracked in detail separately.

The full record

Every date the clause has carried, in order, with the law that set it and the date that law was enacted:

  • December 31, 2012 - Public Law 110-261, enacted July 10, 2008
  • December 31, 2017 - Public Law 112-238, enacted December 30, 2012
  • Deferred to January 19, 2018 - Public Law 115-96, enacted December 22, 2017
  • December 31, 2023 - Public Law 115-118, enacted January 19, 2018
  • April 19, 2024 - Public Law 118-31, enacted December 22, 2023
  • Two years after enactment of the 2024 Act - Public Law 118-49, enacted April 20, 2024
  • April 30, 2026 - Public Law 119-84, enacted April 18, 2026
  • June 12, 2026 - Public Law 119-87, enacted April 30, 2026

Six enacted laws have changed the date and one deferred it. Five of the six also amended the heading of the Section 404(b)(1) transition clause, which has therefore been rewritten almost as often as the deadline itself. Three of them wrote the new date straight into it: Public Law 112-238, Public Law 115-118 and Public Law 118-31. The 2024 Act put the same two-years-after phrase in the heading that it put in the clause. Public Law 119-84 replaced it with the generic words "repeal date", which is why Public Law 119-87 had nothing left to conform and left the heading alone.

Before 2024, the clause was always dealt with on or before the day it was carrying, though not always by replacing the date. December 31, 2012 was replaced on December 30, 2012. December 31, 2017 was not replaced but deferred, on December 22, 2017, to January 19, 2018 - and the law that then set the next date was itself enacted on January 19, 2018. December 31, 2023 was replaced on December 22, 2023.

In 2024 that broke by a day: the clause read April 19, 2024, and the law replacing that date was enacted on April 20, 2024. After June 12, 2026 no replacing law arrived at all.

Primary Sources

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