The US Government Is Hiding a Secret Court Ruling About How It Spies on Americans

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Two Democratic senators who have long overseen US intelligence say the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew a program that lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.
Seven months ago, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court objected to search filters that let intelligence analysts pull Americans’ messages from intercepted data without the approvals, written justifications, or records the law requires. The court approved another year of surveillance anyway. The ruling has never been made public, and Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California say the administration’s own deadline for releasing it passed in September.
The program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), lapsed in June after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March approval. The administration’s own public documentation says rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance.” That window closed September 13, even as intelligence officials press lawmakers to reauthorize the program by the end of the year.
Wyden, the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Schiff, the former chair of its House counterpart, say the administration owes Congress an explanation for the delay, and the names of the officials responsible, by November 6.
“If this administration won’t follow this simple statutory directive,” the senators told Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche in a demand letter obtained exclusively by WIRED, “it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.”
Outside Congress, Demand Progress and 22 other civil liberties and government accountability groups on Monday urged congressional leaders to refuse to reauthorize Section 702 “while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates.” Signatories range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative-backed Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.
The Trump administration has already been pressed, and has promised, to release the ruling. In April, senators Tom Cotton and Mark Warner, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican chair and Democratic vice chair, pressed the administration to release it within 15 days so it could inform the Senate’s debate. In July, asked in writing whether he would commit to declassifying it by the 180-day deadline, Blanche replied, “Yes.”
Warner “has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702,” his communications director, Rachel Cohen, tells WIRED. Neither former director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard nor Bill Pulte, who briefly replaced her as acting director, “were responsive,” Cohen says, “but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan letter and as required by law.”
Cotton’s office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the US Justice Department did not answer questions WIRED sent Friday about the delay.
Clayton, who is legally responsible as director of national intelligence for declassifying the ruling, has made no such promise. Asked before his July confirmation whether he would ensure the opinion was public before Congress voted on reauthorization, he wrote only that the government was “working arduously to expeditiously declassify” it and had made the full opinion available to lawmakers.
Some of what the court found is already known. A FISA court opinion declassified last year described a similar FBI tool, a “participants filter” that let agents select people in contact with surveillance targets and read their messages. In February 2025, the Justice Department’s National Security Division told the court the tool had been running searches no one counted. The FBI shut it off the next month and switched it back on later that year, after the department approved a rebuilt version.
This year’s ruling went beyond that. The court found that tools agencies use to narrow intercepted data to an American’s messages amount to searches of Americans, subject to the same limits, and ordered them rebuilt, The New York Times reported in April, citing unclassified administration talking points sent to lawmakers. Senator Alex Padilla said in a written question to Blanche that the Justice Department “is appealing portions” of the ruling “limiting the government’s use of certain filtering tools.”
While the ruling stayed secret, seven intelligence agency fact sheets from March 2026, one dated the day of the ruling, cited a 98.9 percent compliance rate for FBI searches of Americans and credited Section 702 with stopping a planned terrorist attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. None mentions the court’s findings. The figure appears nowhere in the Justice Department inspector general’s October 2025 review of those searches, which put the compliance rate at 98.6 percent and could not conclude that “the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”
According to the fact sheets, FBI auditors review every such search. FBI director Kash Patel closed the bureau’s Office of Internal Auditing last May and moved its auditors into another division. The bureau’s search counts before 2025 also omit queries run through the participants filter, searches the government’s own privacy watchdog says are “not possible to track.”
Lawmakers who have read the ruling hint that it says more. Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, urged colleagues on the Senate floor in June to read it in a secure room. “I have seen it,” he said. Once they did, he told them, “your opinion of the role of FISA and the rights of Americans will be impacted for sure.”
Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators. The court’s current approval of the program expires in March.
Surveillance reform advocates say the administration may try to avoid that fight by attaching a renewal to the annual defense authorization bill, which Congress usually finalizes in December. In 2023, lawmakers extended Section 702 for four months through that year’s defense bill after a Senate effort to strip the provision failed. This year’s House and Senate versions of the bill do not yet include it.

document fetched 2026-10-28 02:32