The US Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on Wednesday after congressional leaders earlier this month stripped the bill of provisions designed to protect against excessive government surveillance. The “must pass” legislation now heads to President Joe Biden for his expected signature.

The Senate’s 85-14 vote upheld a major expansion of a controversial US surveillance program, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Biden’s signature will ensure that the Trump administration opens up with newfound powers to compel more companies to help US spies wiretap calls between Americans and foreigners abroad. country.

Despite concerns about unprecedented spying powers falling into the hands of controversial figures like Kash Patel, who has vowed to investigate Donald Trump’s political enemies if confirmed to lead the FBI , the Democrats finally made some effort to curb the program.

The Senate Intelligence Committee first approved changes to the 702 program this summer with an amendment aimed at clarifying newly added language that experts described as dangerously vague. . The ambiguous text was introduced into legislation in Congress in April, with Senate Democrats promising to correct the issue later this year. In the end, those efforts proved futile.

Legal experts began issuing warnings last winter over Congress’s efforts to expand FISA to cover a wide range of new businesses not originally subject to Section 702’s wiretap directives. . While reauthorizing the program in April, Congress changed the definition of what the government considers an “electronic communications service provider,” a term used by companies that could be forced to installing wiretaps for the government.

Traditionally, “electronic communications service providers” refers to telephone and email providers, such as AT&T and Google. But as a result of Congress’s re-term, the new limits on the government’s wiretap power are unclear.

It is widely believed that the changes are intended to help the National Security Agency (NSA) target communications stored on servers in US data centers. Because of the classified nature of the 702 program, however, the updated text intentionally avoids specifying which types of new businesses will be subject to the government’s demands.

Marc Zwillinger, one of the few private attorneys to testify before the nation’s secretive surveillance court, wrote in April that changes to the 702 law mean that “any business in the US that has communications ( wiretapped) by a landlord who has access to office wiring, or the data centers where their computers reside,” thereby expanding the 702 program “to a variety of new contexts where there is more there is a high probability that the communications of US citizens and other US persons will be ‘inadvertently’ obtained by the government.”