A secret court looked at how the surveillance state searches Americans’ messages. The court objected. Seven months later, you still can’t read what it said.
Two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California, say the administration is illegally withholding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s findings from Congress until lawmakers renew Section 702, Wired reported on 26 October 2026. According to Wired, Section 702 is the program that “lets federal agents read Americans’ communications without a warrant.”
Wired reported that the 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.”
Then the court approved another year of surveillance ANYWAY.
The Clock Ran Out
The administration’s own public documentation says rulings like this one are reviewed for public release “within 180 days of issuance,” Wired reported. That window closed on 13 September 2026.
There was a promise. In July 2026, the Attorney General was asked in writing whether he would commit to declassifying the ruling by the 180-day deadline. According to Wired, he replied, “Yes.”
The ruling has never been made public.
So the senators wrote a demand letter. They want an explanation for the delay, and the names of the officials responsible, by 6 November 2026. In the letter, obtained by Wired, the senators wrote: “it is unclear why Congress or the American people should trust this administration to follow any of the other legal limits to Section 702.”
A secret ruling, a missed deadline, and a renewal vote they still want to hold.
The Numbers On The Fact Sheets
While the ruling stayed secret, seven intelligence agency fact sheets from March 2026 cited a 98.9 percent compliance rate for FBI searches of Americans, Wired reported. None of them mentions the court’s findings.
That 98.9 percent figure appears nowhere in the Justice Department inspector general’s October 2025 review of those searches. According to Wired, that review put the rate at 98.6 percent and could not conclude that “the FBI’s querying compliance issues are entirely in the past.”
The fact sheets say FBI auditors review every such search. Wired reported that the bureau’s Office of Internal Auditing was closed and its auditors moved into another division.
The bureau’s search counts before 2025 also leave out queries run through a “participants filter.” The government’s own privacy watchdog says those searches are “not possible to track,” according to Wired.
Not possible to track. Who is watching the watchers?
Twenty-Three Groups Say No Deal
On 26 October 2026, Demand Progress and 22 other civil liberties and government accountability groups urged congressional leaders to refuse to reauthorize Section 702 “while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates,” Wired reported. The signatories range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative-backed Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability.
Wired reported that the program lapsed after Congress failed to renew it, though collection continues under the court’s March 2026 approval. That approval expires in March 2027.
Surveillance reform advocates fear a back door. According to Wired, they say the administration may try to attach a renewal to the annual defense authorization bill. In 2023, lawmakers extended Section 702 for four months through that year’s defense bill.
Senator Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of the law. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”
Vote first, read the ruling later? That is no way to run a free country.
Keep Your Money Out Of Their Filters
You can’t read the secret ruling. You CAN decide how much of your financial life ends up in someone else’s database.
Monero hides the sender, the receiver and the amount of each payment by default. A self-custody wallet keeps your keys on your own device, not with an exchange.
Monero One is a free, open-source, self-custody Monero wallet for iPhone and Android. Your keys stay on your device. The app sends us no analytics. Full disclosure: the host built Monero One. He’s biased. He’s also right.
Running a wallet? Learn what a node can see about you: Monero remote node privacy.
Follow @MoneroOne on X and join the Resistance on Telegram (t.me/monero_one).
SOURCES
Join the resistance in style: get Monero One at no cost. It stays free.
Comments
Talk about this story with the resistance on Telegram.
Join the discussion