This is a peaceful protest organized by Digital Fourth and QuitGPT, outside the offices of Rep. Katherine Clark in Malden. We’ll bring signs, take photos, and try to get staffers to meet with us to address constituent concerns. Our allies have already successfully protested surveillance apologist Jim Himes in Connecticut. If you’d like to help organize or sign up to bring people, follow this link to join us on Signal; if you don’t use a smartphone, use this link; if you’d like a flyer to use, it’s here:
Background: Why Protest Warrantless Surveillance?
The government’s powers of surveillance are expanding rapidly. President Trump is illegally giving IRS, Social Security and Selective Service data, face scans, cellphone and browser records to ICE, to hunt down immigrants. He has explicitly reoriented the FBI towards investigations of “antifa”, which to him means basically anybody who disagrees with him. Corporations deploying AI tools like Anthropic, OpenAI, Thomson Reuters, Palantir and Flock Safety are helping him do it. And he has free rein to do all of this in part because of Katherine Clark deciding not to rein in government warrantless surveillance powers under President Biden.
The nightmare fuel that partially powers the surveillance state is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA (specifically, Section 702, introduced in 2008 to retroactively legalize mass surveillance programs created by President Bush). FISA 702 permits warrantless government access to people’s communications, including US persons; it permits warrantless acquisition of people’s commercially available information (location data, browsing data, demographic and other sensitive data), and, because AI is new, a law passed in 2008 doesn’t address the problem of AI vastly accelerating the government’s power to ingest data and surface real or hallucinated “insights” on who’s a threat.
Background: Why Protest Clark?
Katherine Clark is once again in a key position for a key vote on whether to renew, or to reform the government’s powers of warrantless surveillance under FISA 702.
In 2013, when Rep. Clark ran for Congress, we interviewed her and her Republican opponent. Back then, Clark explicitly pledged to support “an individualized warrant based on probable cause before the government can search someone’s email.” When she reached Congress, she did vote at first to rein in the surveillance state. Our scorecard records her voting well right through to June 2019. But at the same time, she was beginning to rise through House Democratic ranks. After Nancy Pelosi stepped down as Speaker and Clark rose to leadership as Minority Whip, there would be no more votes in favor of Americans’ privacy rights.
In 2024, she had a chance to show whether she still cared. For the first time since 2019, for Congress to vote on whether to reform or extend FISA 702. We, along with civil liberties groups on the left and the right and reformers on both sides of the aisle, fought hard for real reforms – notably, to require a warrant before government agencies could search (“query”) NSA’s FISA 702 database. The Biden administration, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Jeffries and House Minority Whip Clark, all combined against us. After months of maneuvering, we managed to get a vote on a warrant requirement. Rep. Clark whipped against it. 30% of Democrats joined just under 70% of Republicans, and in an aching loss, the amendment failed 212-212. With that, civil liberties resistance collapsed, and Congress passed not only a renewal, but three expansions of warrantless surveillance. Even knowing there was a significant risk of President Trump regaining power, Clark supported two of these expansions – giving NSA the power to secretly tap into most U. S. data centers and business networks, and to give NSA legal cover to collect communications where U. S. persons discuss any precursor to narcotics, down to Sudafed and Adderall. Having fought hard against reforms, Clark then circulated the following language in form letters to her constituents, crowing about the (fake, intelligence community-promoted) “reforms” in the renewal, and saying nothing about the real reforms she had helped to block:
Like you, I am concerned by this collection of Americans’ personal data. The American people should not have to worry that their government has unchecked access to their emails, phone calls, and private conversations. Congress has a duty to keep our country safe without compromising the individual rights set forth in our Constitution.
On April 20, 2024, President Biden signed H.R. 7888, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act — reauthorizing foreign intelligence collection for two years while enacting several important reforms to protect civil liberties and improve the process for collection and analysis under Section 702. This new law delivered 56 key reforms, including restrictions on the FBI’s ability to collect or use Section 702 information, as well as severe punishments for abusing our intelligence capabilities.
Please know that I will continue fighting to protect your right to privacy while safeguarding our national security.
Clark has spent the second Trump administration eagerly fundraising off of constituents’ concerns about DOGE and ICE, speaking up accurately about ICE’s “reign of terror” and warrantless searches of “your home without a judicial warrant.” But apparently, requiring the President to get a warrant to search your communications via FISA or to buy access to a full AI-generated profile of you based on commercially available information, is just a step too far. Apparently, Trump’s systematic destruction of the internal guardrails at FBI that the “reforms” in RISAA depended on, is irrelevant. Clark is looking like she wants all the credit for Resisting ICE, without actually cutting off the fuel for its abuses.
Who knows, President Clark might need that fuel someday, to target without a warrant the Americans she sees as real threats. She has certainly argued that these powers are needed for national security; see our rebuttal to her ally Jim Himes’s arguments below. Power, it turns out, is seductive. But it’s Congress’s job, and Clark’s job, to rein Presidents in when they overreach. And Trump’s very obvious overreaching should make this an easy lift.
Without emphatic opposition to warrantless surveillance from Democratic leadership, reforms as embodied this year in three bills (GSRA, the Senate’s SAFE Act, and the Republican-led PLEWSA) will fail. Some brave Republicans and Democrats are stepping up in favor of reform. Jeffries’ office is at least meeting with us. Clark, in this Congress, has said nothing at all about these powers. Let’s change that.
https://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/RT4-Rebuttal-to-Himes-One-Pager-2026-03-19-v3.pdf