#4 FISA Section 702: How the Government Searches Americans Without a Warrant
Three things on the table today. Three things that are happening right now while most of the country is staring at its phone. Three things that directly affect your life, your money, your job, and your freedom. And three things that almost nobody in power is being straight with you about.
First. Your own government is about to vote to keep spying on you. Not China. Not Iran. You. American citizens. And they are going to use the war with Iran as the excuse to push it through while nobody is paying attention. It is called FISA. Section 702. And your Republican representatives — your people, the ones you voted for — are about to hand the government a blank check to surveil Americans without a warrant, because the last time they had a chance to stop it they folded, and this time there is a war on so they will fold even faster.
Second. Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and about a dozen other countries that contribute almost nothing to global security are lining up to tell America what it should and should not be doing. Countries that can’t defend themselves. Countries that would be speaking Russian or Chinese right now if it weren’t for American blood and American money. Standing on a stage with a microphone they didn’t earn, telling us we’re doing it wrong.
Third. Fifty thousand Americans lost their jobs last year because of AI, Congress has no plan, China is building the future while we hold hearings, and the people who got cut are being told to just adapt. By people who will never have to adapt to anything.
I’m Brian Bullock. This is Everyone Knows. Nobody is going to like all of what I say today. I don’t care. Speak up or step aside.
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FISA — YOUR OWN PARTY IS ABOUT TO SELL YOU OUT. AGAIN.
I want to talk to my fellow Republicans first. Because this one is on us.
FISA. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Section 702 specifically. This is the law that allows the federal government to collect communications from foreign targets — and here is the part they gloss over — including any American who happens to be in contact with those foreign targets. No warrant. No probable cause. No judge signing off because there is actual evidence against you. Just a government database full of your emails, your phone calls, your messages, collected because you talked to someone they were watching.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is documented. The FBI has used Section 702 data to run warrantless searches on American citizens millions of times. Millions. They searched the communications of a sitting United States congressman. They searched the communications of a sitting senator. They searched the communications of people who attended protests. They searched the communications of people who donated to political campaigns. Your communications. Mine. Anyone’s. Because once that data is collected, there is almost nothing stopping them from searching it whenever they feel like it.
Republicans had a chance to end this in 2024. Real chance. There were enough votes. There was enough appetite for it. And at the last minute, after all the tough talk about government overreach and deep state surveillance and the weaponization of federal agencies against American citizens — they folded. They reauthorized it. Gave the surveillance state another lease on life and went home.
Now it is coming up again. And here is the thing that should make your blood boil. The war with Iran just started. And the Trump administration is going to use that war to make FISA reauthorization politically impossible to vote against. Because now you’ve got Iranian sleeper cells as the boogeyman. Now you’ve got a shooting war in the Middle East and drone strikes on American embassies and a mass shooting in Austin by a guy wearing Iranian colors. And any Republican who votes against FISA renewal is going to be painted as soft on terrorism. Soft on Iran. A threat to national security.
Watch. That is exactly what is going to happen. And most of them are going to cave. Because that is what most of them do.
Here is what I want you to think about. The same people screaming about the deep state spying on Trump — and they were right, by the way, there was surveillance, it was real, it was wrong — those same people are about to vote to keep the machinery that makes that possible. They want to complain about government surveillance when it happens to their guy and then vote to preserve government surveillance when it might happen to your guy. That is not a principle. That is a preference. And I don’t have a lot of patience for it.
The Fourth Amendment is not complicated. Unreasonable searches and seizures. Warrants based on probable cause. That is the whole deal. That is what the founders put in there because they had lived under a government that searched whoever it wanted whenever it wanted. They knew what that looked like. They built the protection into the foundation of the country.
Section 702 drives a truck through that protection every single day and calls it national security. And the argument is always the same: we need this to keep you safe. We need this to catch the bad guys. We need this because the threats are real and the world is dangerous.
You know what else is real and dangerous? A government with unlimited access to the private communications of its own citizens and no meaningful check on how it uses that access. History has a lot to say about how that ends. None of it is good.
I support strong national security. I support going after foreign threats hard. I support what we are doing in Iran. None of that requires reading your emails without a warrant. You can be tough on enemies without turning your own citizens into suspects. The fact that Washington can’t figure that out, or won’t, is the problem.
Call your representative. Tell them no on clean FISA reauthorization. Tell them warrant requirements are not optional. Tell them you are watching. Because if you don’t, they will assume you aren’t, and they will do what is politically easy. They always do.
And let me give you the full picture of what Section 702 has actually been used for, because the government sure as hell does not lead with this in the press conferences. The FBI ran warrantless searches on the communications of January 6th defendants. Fine, you say, those were bad actors. Okay. They also ran warrantless searches on Black Lives Matter protesters. They ran searches on people who donated to political campaigns. They ran a search on a sitting United States senator. They ran searches on crime victims who had reported crimes to the FBI. People who called the federal government for help and had their private communications searched as a result. These are not hypotheticals. These are documented. These are cases that came out in court, in inspector general reports, in congressional testimony.
The government$’s answer every time this comes up is: we fixed it. We put new procedures in place. We trained the agents. It won$’t happen again. And then it happens again. It has happened again every single time. Because the problem is not that individual agents are bad. The problem is that the power exists. When the power exists, it gets used. That is not cynicism. That is history. Every government in the history of civilization that has had the power to surveil its own citizens without meaningful checks has abused that power. Every single one. The United States is not magically exempt from that pattern because we wrote nice things in our founding documents.
The reform crowd says: just add a warrant requirement for searches of American communications. Seems reasonable, right? The intelligence community says a warrant requirement would slow things down too much, would compromise operations, would make us less safe. And maybe in some specific cases that is true. But the alternative they are proposing is: trust us. Trust us not to search your communications without cause. Trust us even though we have proven repeatedly that we will search your communications without cause whenever we feel like it. I do not trust them. I do not think you should either. Trust is earned. They have not earned it.
The Iran war makes this harder to talk about, which is exactly why I am talking about it now. When the country is in a shooting war and people are scared, that is when civil liberties get sold cheapest and loudest and fastest. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 with almost no opposition because the country was terrified and nobody wanted to be the person who voted against protecting America. And we are still living with the consequences of that vote twenty-five years later. FISA Section 702 is the Patriot Act of this moment. They will use the war. They will use the fear. They will use the Austin shooting and every other threat they can point to. And some of your representatives will stand up and say they had no choice.
They had a choice. They always have a choice. The choice is harder when the country is scared. That is precisely when it matters most that somebody makes it anyway.
SEGMENT TWO: THE HALL MONITOR COUNTRIES — SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP
Let me paint you a picture. You are at a neighborhood cookout. You bought the food. You built the grill. You did the work. You have been doing the work for decades. And there is a guy at the end of the table who has never brought anything, never cooked anything, never cleaned anything up after, who wanders over while you are flipping burgers and starts telling you that you are doing it wrong. The coals are too hot. The burgers should be thicker. Have you considered a vegetarian option.
That guy is Canada. That guy is France. That guy is Germany. That guy is the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, and about a dozen other countries that have made a comfortable living letting America pay for their security while they stand on the sidelines and tell us how we should behave.
NATO. Let’s start there because it is the most obvious example. NATO requires member countries to spend two percent of their GDP on defense. Two percent. That is the agreement. That is what they signed. The United States spends three and a half percent. You know who hits the two percent target? Almost nobody. Germany — the biggest economy in Europe, the country that has benefited more than almost anyone from American security guarantees since World War Two — spent years running at around one percent. One percent. And when America points this out, Germany gets offended.
France left NATO’s military command structure for decades. Just walked out. Decided they didn’t want to participate in the mutual defense arrangement they were still happy to benefit from. Came back eventually. But the attitude never really changed. France has strong opinions about what America should do in every corner of the world, delivered with the specific confidence of a country that hasn’t won a major war without American help since the 1800s.
Canada. My God. Canada lectures America about human rights, immigration, climate, democratic values, and pretty much anything else that fits in a press release. Canada also spent years spending barely over one percent of GDP on defense while sheltering under the American security umbrella like it was a God-given right. Canada shares the longest undefended border in the world with the United States. Canada has not had to defend that border because we defend it for them. And the thank you for that is a steady stream of moral instruction from Ottawa.
The Nordic countries are in a class by themselves. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark — these are the moral authority capitals of the world. Everything comes with a human rights condition attached. Norway hands out the Nobel Peace Prize every year from a country protected by NATO, funded largely by American commitment, while lecturing the people providing that protection about whether they are being nice enough. Sweden was neutral for two hundred years. Neutral. Meaning when the world was on fire, when actual evil was marching across Europe, Sweden sat it out and sold steel to whoever was buying. Now they want a seat at the table to tell the rest of us how international norms should work.
The Netherlands hosts the International Court of Justice. Belgium hosts NATO headquarters and the European Union. Both countries act like hosting the institutions gives them moral authority over the institutions. It does not. Renting out your real estate to an organization does not make you its conscience.
Here is what all of these countries have in common. They spend other people’s money on their own security, keep their own defense budgets light, and use the savings to build generous social programs that their voters love, which lets their politicians get reelected, which lets them stand on international stages and talk about values. It is a great deal if you can get it. America has been subsidizing that deal for eighty years.
And when America does something these countries disagree with — strikes on Iran, immigration policy, trade decisions, anything — they hold press conferences. They issue statements. They call for restraint. They demand explanations. They express deep concern. They are very, very good at expressing deep concern. What they are not good at is showing up when it matters, spending what they agreed to spend, and doing the actual hard work of maintaining a stable world order.
I’ll say this clearly. I do not want America picking fights it doesn’t need to pick. I believe in America First. I believe in protecting American lives, American interests, and American money. But the countries lecturing us are not doing it from a position of moral authority. They are doing it from a position of comfort. Comfort that exists because we paid for it. The next time Canada wants to tell America how to run its foreign policy, Canada can start by writing a check for what it owes NATO and then we’ll talk.
Until then. Sit down.
You want a specific example of how this works? Let$’s talk about the Iran strikes. The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury last week. Strikes on Iran$’s nuclear program, its missile infrastructure, its military and political leadership. You can have opinions about whether that was the right call. I$’m not here to relitigate the decision. What I am here to talk about is the reaction from our European friends.
Within hours $— hours $— France issued a statement calling for de-escalation and urging restraint. Germany expressed grave concern. Canada called for dialogue. The European Union asked for an emergency session to discuss the situation. Sweden, which only recently joined NATO after two hundred years of sitting out every conflict, had thoughts. Norway had thoughts. Belgium, which contributes so little to NATO defense that it has been an embarrassment for years, had thoughts.
None of these countries offered to help. None of them put forces on the table. None of them said: we are with you, what do you need. They issued statements. They expressed concern. They called for restraint from the country doing the heavy lifting while they watched from a very safe distance.
This is the pattern. Every single time. America acts. Europe talks. America spends the blood and the money. Europe holds the press conference. And then when it is over, Europe wants credit for being part of the Western alliance that made the outcome possible. They want the security without the sacrifice. They want the alliance without the commitment. They want the seat at the table without paying for the meal.
And the thing that makes me angriest about this is not the freeloading itself. Countries do what is in their interest. I understand that. What makes me angry is the condescension. The absolute nerve it takes to be protected by American power for eighty years, to have your security subsidized by American taxpayers for eighty years, and then look down your nose at the Americans paying for it. That is not a small thing. That is a profound moral failure dressed up as sophistication.
Germany rebuilt after World War Two under an American security umbrella. Japan rebuilt under an American security umbrella. South Korea exists as a free country because American soldiers died there. Taiwan has existed as a free society for seventy years in large part because of American commitment in the Pacific. The entire post-war liberal international order $— the one that allowed Western Europe to grow wealthy and safe and smug $— was built and maintained on American power and American money.
The next time Emmanuel Macron wants to give a speech about American foreign policy, somebody should hand him a bill. Not for the speech. For the eighty years of protection that made it possible for France to be wealthy and stable enough that its president has time to give speeches about other countries$’ foreign policy. That bill is enormous. They cannot pay it. Which means the least they can do is be quiet when we are doing the work.
I want allies. Real allies. Countries that show up, spend what they agreed to spend, and stand with us when it matters instead of just when it is easy. Those allies exist. Poland is spending four percent of GDP on defense and meaning it. The Baltic states are serious about their own security. Australia has stepped up. There are countries out there that actually behave like partners.
The hall monitors are not those countries. The hall monitors are the ones with the megaphone and none of the muscle. And I am done pretending they have earned the right to use it.
SEGMENT THREE: AI — AMERICA NEEDS TO PICK A LANE AND FLOOR IT
Fifty thousand jobs. Gone last year. Amazon. Microsoft. Salesforce. IBM. They told their shareholders straight out: AI does it cheaper. And the people who lost those jobs got a severance package and a LinkedIn post wishing them well on their next chapter.
Now before I go any further, let me tell you what I actually think about AI, because I am tired of this conversation being dominated by two groups of people who are both wrong. The panic crowd and the dismissal crowd.
The panic crowd wants you terrified. Robots taking over. Skynet. The end of human relevance. AI is going to destroy civilization. These people show up with scary graphics and dramatic music and they want you so afraid that you will hand the government unlimited power to regulate, slow down, and control the technology. Scared people are easy to control. That is the whole game.
The dismissal crowd wants you calm and quiet. Don’t worry. Technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. The Industrial Revolution worked out fine. Just adapt. These are the people whose jobs are not at risk, whose mortgages are not on the line, who will never personally feel what it is like to be fifty-two years old and find out your position has been eliminated because a software system does it for a fraction of the cost. Easy to say adapt when you are not the one adapting.
Both of those crowds are selling you something. My job is not to sell you anything. My job is to tell you what I actually think, and what I actually think is this.
AI is the next wave. It is not coming. It is here. It is inside your bank right now making decisions about your credit. It is reading medical images. It is writing legal documents. It is handling logistics for companies moving millions of packages a day. It wrote parts of the report your company presented last quarter. It is in the cockpit of commercial aircraft. It is everywhere, it is accelerating, and it does not care whether Washington has figured out what to do about it.
Jobs will be lost. Real jobs, held by real people. That is true and I am not going to soft-pedal it. The fifty thousand from last year are not the ceiling. They are the floor. The number is going to go up before it stabilizes. And some of those people are going to have a genuinely hard time, and they deserve better than being told the market will sort it out by someone who has never had to worry about the market sorting out their paycheck.
But here is the part of the conversation that gets buried every single time. New jobs are also being created. Jobs that do not fully exist yet because the technology creating them is still being built. Somebody has to maintain these systems. Somebody has to audit what they produce. Somebody has to build the infrastructure they run on. Somebody has to train the next generation of people who work with this stuff. Those are real jobs. American jobs, if we decide we want them.
We have been here before. When this country was industrial, millions of people worked in factories. Then we shipped those factories overseas. That hurt. Badly. Whole communities hollowed out and never came back. Then we became a service economy. And now service jobs are in line, and people are acting like this time is uniquely catastrophic. It is not uniquely catastrophic. It is the same pattern we have lived through every time the economy shifts. Every time, it was painful. Every time, it was not the end. The question is not whether we survive the transition. We will. The question is what we do for the people in the middle of it.
And that is where I have a real problem with how this is being handled. The companies pulling in record profits from AI automation — and these are record profits, not modest gains, record profits — have an obligation to the people they displaced. Not because I am a socialist. I am the opposite of a socialist. But because those workers helped build the businesses that made those profits possible. Because the American economy that allowed those companies to exist is held together by working people who need to be able to find jobs and pay their bills. You cannot gut your workforce, pocket the difference, and then wonder why the country feels like it’s coming apart. That is not a political argument. That is arithmetic.
Now. Washington. Let’s talk about Washington, because this is where I get genuinely angry.
They have known AI was coming. They have known for years. There have been hearings. There have been task forces. There have been executive orders. There has been an enormous amount of talking and a near-total absence of doing. What has the United States government produced in terms of a coherent national AI strategy? Nothing you could hand to an American worker and say: here is the plan, here is where we are going, here is what the country is doing.
You have one side that wants to regulate everything. Slow it down. Put guardrails on it. Study the guardrails. Form a committee to oversee the study of the guardrails. These people think slowing down American AI development is responsible. It is not responsible. It is unilateral disarmament. You do not win a technology race by making your own team run slower. China is not slowing down. China decided years ago that AI is the future of national power and they went all in. Government money. National resources. A real strategy. They are building. We are deliberating.
You have the other side that wants to stay completely out of it. Free market. Hands off. Let it develop. And look, I believe in the free market. I believe in American ingenuity and the private sector. But hands off with zero guidance and zero accountability is not a strategy. It is abdication. When fifty thousand people lose their jobs in a single year and the government has nothing to say about what comes next, that is not the free market working. That is a vacuum where leadership should be.
What neither side is doing is the obvious thing. Deciding that America is going to win this. Not manage it. Not regulate it carefully from a distance. Win it. Be the country that builds the best AI in the world. Lead the world in this technology. Set the standard. Fund the research. Build the infrastructure. Actually educate the workforce for the economy they are going to live in, not the economy of thirty years ago. Hold corporations accountable when they take AI gains and dump the workers. And explain to the American people clearly and honestly what is happening and what they can do about it.
Because here is what AI is also doing that nobody talks about when they are busy panicking about jobs. It is finding cancer before doctors can. Earlier detection, earlier treatment, better outcomes. It is designing drug molecules for diseases we currently have no answer for. It is going to change medicine in ways that save millions of lives. It is optimizing energy grids and water systems and supply chains in ways that benefit everyone. It is making engineering faster and safer. It is going to build things and solve problems that we cannot fully predict right now because the technology is still developing.
The job story is real. It is not the whole story. The whole story is that this technology, handled right, is one of the most powerful tools for human progress ever developed. And handled wrong — meaning handed to China while America argues about it, or left completely unguided while corporations take all the gains and workers take all the losses — it becomes a disaster. Not a robot apocalypse disaster. A practical, economic, geopolitical disaster. The kind where America falls behind and spends a generation trying to catch up.
So what do I want? I want America to decide it is going to win. Pick the lane. Commit to it. Stop treating this technology like a problem to be managed and start treating it like an opportunity to be seized. Fund the research. Build the infrastructure. Prepare the workforce. Take care of the people in the transition. Hold corporations to account. And for the love of God, stop letting China set the pace while we hold another hearing.
We invented the internet. We put a man on the moon. We built the most powerful military in the history of civilization. We have done hard, important, world-changing things before. This is the next one. Act like it.
Let me give you a real picture of what is at stake here, because I do not think most people understand the scale of what we are talking about when we talk about AI and national competitiveness.
The country that leads in artificial intelligence will have an enormous advantage in defense. AI-driven weapons systems, AI-driven intelligence analysis, AI-driven logistics. The Pentagon is already behind where it needs to be on this. Other countries are catching up. The military edge America has built over decades is partly a technological edge, and that edge is not guaranteed to last if we keep treating AI development like a regulation problem instead of a national security imperative.
The country that leads in AI will have an advantage in medicine. We are talking about drug discovery that currently takes twelve to fifteen years being compressed to two or three. We are talking about personalized cancer treatments designed for your specific tumor based on your specific genetics. We are talking about diagnostic tools that catch diseases earlier than any human doctor can catch them. That advantage in medicine means longer lives, lower healthcare costs, and an economy where people are healthier and more productive. That is not a small thing.
The country that leads in AI will have an advantage in manufacturing. Not the manufacturing of fifty years ago. New manufacturing. Advanced manufacturing. The kind that brings jobs back to American soil because AI-driven automation makes domestic production competitive again. The kind where a skilled technician working with AI tools can produce what used to require a floor full of workers overseas. That is a real path back to American industrial strength if we are serious about pursuing it.
China understands all of this. China has a plan. They call it Made in China 2025. They call it AI 2030. They have national strategies with funding and timelines and accountability. You can argue about whether those strategies are working perfectly. They are not. China has its own problems. But the difference between a country with an imperfect plan and a country with no plan is enormous. We are the country with no plan.
And here is the thing about falling behind in a technology race. It is very hard to catch up. The advantages compound. The country that builds the best AI attracts the best AI researchers. The best AI researchers produce better AI, which attracts more talent, which produces better AI. The infrastructure, the data, the expertise $— it all concentrates in the country that got there first. If China builds a ten-year lead in AI capability, closing that gap is not a matter of spending more money next year. It is a generational project.
We are not ten years behind. We are not five years behind. Right now, the United States still has the best AI research in the world. The best companies. The best universities. The best talent base. We have advantages that China cannot buy overnight. But those advantages are not permanent. They require investment, they require commitment, and they require a government that treats this like the national priority it is instead of a topic for hearings.
So when I say pick a lane and floor it, I am not being cute. I am saying: the window is open right now. American AI is still leading. The workforce is still here. The talent is still here. The moment exists to build something that secures American technological dominance for a generation. And every month we spend arguing about regulation and risk and who gets to study the guardrails is a month China is using to close the gap.
Pick the lane. Fund the research. Build the infrastructure. Train the workforce. Take care of the people in the transition. Hold the corporations accountable. And win the race.
Because the alternative $— the one where we regulate ourselves into irrelevance while China builds the future $— is not a theoretical risk. It is the direction we are currently heading. Someone needs to say it out loud. I just did.
CLOSE
Three things today.
FISA is coming back, the war with Iran is going to be used to push it through, and your Republican representatives are probably going to fold the same way they folded last time. Call them. Tell them warrant requirements are not negotiable. Tell them you are watching. Because if you don’t watch, they will assume you aren’t.
Canada, France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the rest of the hall monitor countries need to stop. You don’t get a megaphone at the adult table when America has been paying your security bill for eighty years. Contribute what you agreed to contribute, defend yourselves, and then we can have a conversation about international norms. Until then, the strongly worded statements can wait.
And AI is here whether Washington is ready or not. Fifty thousand jobs gone last year. More coming. But also new jobs, new medicine, new capabilities we haven’t imagined yet. The question is not whether this technology changes everything. It will. The question is whether America leads that change or chases it. Right now we are chasing. We should be leading. Pick a lane. Floor it. Win.
That is Everyone Knows. The hard truth, the stuff nobody else will say, and the thing that keeps you going.
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