Key keywords: FISA Section 702, Rep. Eric Crawford, US federal surveillance law, counterterrorism operations, 9/11 terror attacks, US national security, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FBI surveillance reform, congressional legislative deadline, transnational terror threats Arkansas Republican Representative and House Intelligence Committee member Eric Crawford issued a stark warning this week during a markup hearing for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 reauthorization, stating that failure to renew the critical surveillance authority before its year-end expiration will create dangerous intelligence gaps that could allow a terrorist attack on the scale of September 11, 2001, to occur on US soil. First enacted in 2008, Section 702 authorizes US intelligence agencies to collect communications data from non-US persons located outside the country without obtaining individual case-by-case warrants, a tool that intelligence officials say has been used to disrupt dozens of transnational terror plots, cyberattacks, and foreign espionage operations over the past 15 years. Crawford cited newly declassified counterterrorism data during his remarks, noting that US security agencies are currently tracking more than 80 known individuals with ties to designated terror groups including al Qaeda and ISIS who have attempted to cross the US southern border in 2024 alone, and that 702 surveillance tools are the primary source of intelligence for monitoring these individuals’ cross-border communications with overseas terror networks. He referenced the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report, which found that failures to share and access critical cross-border communications data between intelligence agencies allowed the 19 hijackers to coordinate their plot undetected in the months leading up to the attack, arguing that lapsing 702 would recreate those same structural intelligence failures. The renewal effort has faced bipartisan pushback from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who have raised concerns about repeated documented abuses of 702 authority, including thousands of improper warrantless searches of the communications data of US citizens that were incidentally collected in the course of foreign surveillance operations. Critics have pushed for amendments that would require intelligence agencies to obtain a probable cause warrant from a FISA court before searching the 702 database for data linked to US persons, a change that Crawford and other national security hawks argue would add crippling bureaucratic delays to time-sensitive counterterrorism investigations. With Congress set to enter its holiday recess in mid-December, lawmakers have less than three weeks to reach a compromise on reauthorization language before the authority lapses entirely, a outcome that Crawford warned would be “the single most self-destructive national security decision Congress could make in a generation.”