One of America’s Biggest Surveillance Laws Expired — and Almost Nothing Changed

Section 702’s status is moving fast. As of this writing it lapsed in June 2026.

In June 2026, one of the most powerful surveillance authorities the U.S. government has ever held — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — expired. The statute hit its sunset, Congress didn’t agree on a renewal in time, and the clock ran out.

Here’s the part that should stop you: the surveillance didn’t.

That’s not a scandal in the tabloid sense. It’s a drafting feature, and it’s worth understanding, because it’s a perfect illustration of what this blog is about. Section 702 doesn’t work by continuously re-authorizing itself. It works through annual “certifications” approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and the directives issued under those certifications are written to survive the statute that spawned them. The court signed off on the most recent round in early 2026. Those certifications carry their own expiration dates — running well into 2027 — and the law says they stay valid until then, even if the underlying statute sunsets first.

So the “expiration” expired nothing in the short run. Collection authorized before the deadline keeps rolling on its own schedule. The sunset is real on paper and hollow in practice, at least for the length of a certification cycle.

Sit with that, because it’s a lesson in statutory design, not just surveillance politics. A sunset clause is supposed to be a forcing mechanism: renew me or I die. But if the operative authority is lodged in grandfathered instruments that outlive the statute, the forcing mechanism is soft. The law can “end” while the machine it built keeps running for another year.

This is exactly the kind of problem the model act I’m drafting must solve on purpose. When you write a “disposition” rule — a rule about when authority and data actually stop — you have to decide whether the deadline binds the machine or just the paperwork. Section 702 shows what happens when you get that wrong: a very public expiration with a very quiet afterlife.

I’ll come back to FISA all year in the Thursday series, because it’s arguably the closest thing we have to a working lifecycle-surveillance statute, and its minimization and use rules are a goldmine of ideas — and cautionary tales — for the sections I’m building. For now, the takeaway is small and sharp: a law can expire without stopping a thing. If your instinct is that expiration should mean “stop,” hold onto that instinct. We’re going to need it.