Section 702 of FISA, the warrantless foreign intel provision, sunsets June 12. The FISA Court has already certified the program through March 2027, giving Congress nine months, not zero, to negotiate reforms.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that lets US intelligence agencies collect foreigners' messages without a warrant, expired at midnight on June 12, 2026. The collection it authorizes does not stop with it, according to Ars Technica.
The reason is the unusual design of the statute itself. Section 702 of FISA, the provision that lets the National Security Agency and FBI collect foreigners' messages routed through US infrastructure and that routinely sweeps in Americans' communications, runs on yearlong certifications issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The current certification was issued on March 17, 2026 and runs through March 17, 2027, Ars Technica reported. As long as the court has authorized the program, collection continues regardless of whether the underlying statute is technically in force.
Congress wrote Title VII to keep working through a statutory lapse. The statute's drafters anticipated that the law might sunset for a period, and the section explicitly allows surveillance to continue under existing certifications during any such gap. So the question for the next nine months is not whether 702 keeps running. It is whether the public, the press, and members of Congress use the gap to press for warrant protections before the FISA Court hands out the next yearlong stamp.
That is also why the "going dark" claim, the argument that letting the law expire would suddenly disable a critical intelligence tool, has drawn fire from civil-liberties groups as a pressure tactic. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law called the rhetoric "fearmongering" designed to push members into passing a clean reauthorization without meaningful reforms, according to Ars Technica. The pressure point is the statutory clock itself: hawks frame the sunset as a national-security emergency, while reformers frame the same nine-month window as an opening to negotiate warrant protections before the next FISA Court certification cycle.
For now, the practical effect of the June 12 sunset is a paperwork problem, not a surveillance problem. FBI and NSA collection continues under the March 17, 2026 certification, Ars Technica reported. Intelligence committees in both chambers retain oversight authority, and any new program authority would have to clear the same congressional path as the original 702 statute. The next time the program faces a real vote, the question is what warrant protections, if any, come with it.