1. United States
2. Mich.
3. Letter

To: Members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives The Issue: The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution clearly protects the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. It mandates that no warrant shall issue without probable cause. Despite this explicit constitutional wall, federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely circumvent the law to spy on American citizens without a warrant. Through the "backdoor search" loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), billions of digital communications—including emails, texts, and phone calls belonging to American citizens—are swept up into massive databases. Federal agencies query this domestic data hundreds of thousands of times a year without ever presenting probable cause to a judge. Furthermore, federal agencies are actively bypassing constitutional limits by purchasing Americans' private location histories and online activity directly from commercial data brokers. National security does not require sacrificing fundamental civil liberties. The Demand: We, the undersigned, demand that Congress immediately halt any clean, un-reformed extension or reauthorization of FISA Section 702 and pass comprehensive privacy legislation to ensure that: 1 A Strict Warrant Requirement: Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies must obtain a probable cause warrant from a traditional judge before querying or viewing any communications or data belonging to a U.S. person collected under foreign intelligence authorities. 2 Close the Data Broker Loophole: Congress must explicitly prohibit federal agencies from purchasing Americans' personal data—including location information, web browsing history, and digital footprints—from commercial data brokers without a legally authorized warrant. 3 True Transparency and Oversight: Independent public advocates must be given greater power in the FISA Court to protect the public’s civil liberties, and federal agencies must provide clear, unclassified, annual accounting of all data queries involving American citizens. The Fourth Amendment is not a suggestion. We demand that our representatives protect our data, defend our privacy, and uphold the United States Constitution.