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free press
Rights Groups to Dems: Don't Give Stephen Miller What He Wants on Mass Surveillance
“Supporting Stephen Miller’s warrantless surveillance agenda would be a massive detriment to the privacy and civil rights and liberties of people in the United States."
Mar 12, 2026
More than 90 civil society groups on Thursday urged congressional Democrats to "stand firm against White House efforts to extend government surveillance powers" by renewing "without new safeguards" a highly controversial surveillance authorization historically abused by federal agencies.
Free Press Action and Demand Progress are leading the call to senior Democratic lawmakers to not reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—a controversial law that has been abused hundreds of thousands of times—without first enacting privacy reforms.
“Section 702 has been used to conduct millions of warrantless ‘backdoor’ searches for the phone calls, text messages, and emails of people in the United States,” the groups said in a letter to six senior Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both of New York.
Free Press Action & 90 civil-society groups call on Democratic leaders to stand firm against White House efforts to extend government surveillance powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without new safeguards.Our statement: www.freepress.net/news/massive...
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— Free Press (@freepress.bsky.social) March 12, 2026 at 11:32 AM
The groups—which include the ACLU, Center for Biological Diversity, Color of Change, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Indivisible, National Immigrant Justice Center, Public Citizen, and UltraViolet Action—cited recent reporting from Politico stating that Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump's xenophobic deputy chief of staff, supports extending the program that empowers federal agencies to surveil and collect the data of noncitizens abroad without a warrant.
As Free Press Action explained Thursday:
Congress has until April 20 to reauthorize Section 702. Stephen Miller is a leading advocate for extending Section 702 without any reforms, and President Trump is now openly supporting this approach. The groups urge Democratic members of Congress to refuse to reauthorize these powers without key reforms, including reforms to the government’s warrantless querying of communications of people in the United States without prior court approval. Such surveillance allows government officials to conduct sweeping backdoor searches, accessing the private communications of millions of people.
“Supporting Stephen Miller’s warrantless surveillance agenda would be a massive detriment to the privacy and civil rights and liberties of people in the United States,” the letter adds. "These surveillance authorities have long jeopardized privacy, and efforts by Miller to continue them without meaningful reforms and sufficient oversight are deeply troubling.”
The groups emphasize the imperative to close the so-called backdoor search loophole—via which domestic law enforcement agencies can access Americans’ communications without a warrant—and the data broker loophole, which lets the government to buy its way around Fourth Amendment proscriptions on warrantless search and seizure by purchasing sensitive information from private vendors.
I've long been sounding the alarm on Section 702 of FISA, and secret, legal loopholes the government uses to spy on Americans. The program is up for reauthorization in April and I'll be fighting like hell to make sure the current program doesn’t get rubber stamped.
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— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) March 11, 2026 at 10:41 AM
Earlier this month, more than 70 congressional Democrats demanded a new investigation into warrantless purchases of Americans’ location data by Department of Homeland Security agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Last month, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Security and Freedom Enhancement (SAFE) Act, which would protect Americans from warrantless government surveillance by requiring authorities to obtain a FISA Title I order or a warrant before accessing Americans’ communications.
The civil society groups that signed the letter are also urging lawmakers to fix the "overbroad" expansion of electronic communication service providers and remove barrier to the FISA legal process.
"There are terrifying risks to reauthorizing government surveillance powers that have been abused to spy on protesters, immigrants, journalists, and even political candidates under any presidential administration," said Jenna Ruddock, advocacy director at Free Press Action. "People across the country and on both sides of the aisle agree, and overwhelmingly support urgently needed reforms to FISA."
“This White House in particular has relentlessly labelled perceived political opponents as ‘domestic terrorists,’ justifying in their minds the relentless surveillance and persecution of those who oppose the administration’s agenda," Ruddock added. "Congress must insist on these common-sense reforms and put the civil and constitutional rights of Americans above the authoritarian desires of Miller and others in the Trump administration.”
Demand Progress senior policy adviser Hajar Hammado said that “Democrats do not want this or any administration to have the power to trawl through Americans’ private emails and texts without warrants. Democratic leaders need to listen to the people and not just rubber-stamp the spy powers that Miller is asking for."
"This extends beyond partisan politics," Hammado continued. "No president should have the powers to hoover up Americans’ private communications, force janitors and security guards to spy on other Americans for them, or circumvent court orders by purchasing sensitive information about people in the United States from data brokers."
"As the government’s plans to supercharge surveillance with AI come into view," she added, "Congress must enact real reforms to curb invasive government spying.”
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'This Is a Wake-Up Call': Critics Disgusted as Billionaire Bezos Guts Washington Post
"Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be."
Feb 04, 2026
The Washington Post announced massive cuts to its newsroom staff on Wednesday, unleashing a wave of disgust directed toward its owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
As reported by Semafor reporter Maxwell Tani, Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers at the paper that it would be closing its sports department "in its current form," and would also be "killing its book section, suspending its Post Reports podcast, restructuring its metro section, and shrinking its international footprint."
With hundreds of journalists expected to lose their jobs, Murray told Post employees that the cuts were needed to help the paper "become more essential to people's lives" in "what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has had struggles to do that."
Many critics, however, scoffed at claims that cuts at the paper were needed to make it profitable, suggesting the real motivation came from Bezos' desire to take an ax to the US free press.
Brian Phillips, senior writer at The Ringer, rejected the notion that one of the richest men in the world couldn't afford to keep what was once a revered newspaper fully staffed.
"Bezos isn't destroying the Washington Post because it isn't profitable," he wrote in a social media post. "He's destroying the Washington Post because he's calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests."
Phillips also implored other journalists to not report on the Post layoffs as "a straightforward business story," but rather "a story about coercive social transformation being imposed by people so rich they've ceased to see the rest of us as legitimate stakeholders in our own lives."
David Sirota, founder of The Lever, said the layoffs should end journalists' fantasies that billionaire owners will rescue journalism in an era of mass consolidation by corporate conglomerates, slashed newsroom budgets, and wave after wave of layoffs.
"The media world’s stunned/shocked reaction to the awful WaPo layoffs shows that even now, so many in journalism still can’t believe billionaires aren’t going to rescue them," he wrote. "This is a wake-up call: Oligarchs are not the benevolent saviors media have long depicted them to be."
Adam Serwer of the Atlantic also raised concerns about the power of wealthy oligarchs to buy and destroy historic media institutions.
"I personally do not think some rich man should be able to buy an institution like this like a toy and then break it when he doesn’t want to play with it anymore," he wrote. "Bezos fucked the paper and instead of fixing it he’s destroying it despite the fact that he could spend the money to make things right without even noticing its absence."
Jonathan Cohn, political director for Progressive Mass, noted that the Post isn't the only media organization that's being gutted by a billionaire owner, referencing billionaire Larry Ellison, a major donor to President Donald Trump, who recently acquired CBS News alongside other media properties.
"What we are seeing with WaPo and with CBS News is that the mega-rich see real financial value for themselves in destroying journalism," he wrote. "Let that sink in."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a post written before the Post layoffs were announced, drew attention to billionaire control over not just traditional media, but social media as well.
"When we talk about authoritarianism, it’s not just Donald Trump," wrote Sanders. "[Elon] Musk owns X. Bezos owns Twitch. [Mark] Zuckerberg owns Instagram and Facebook. Larry Ellison controls TikTok. Billionaires increasingly control what we see, hear and read."
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The Other Heroes on the Streets of Minneapolis? Citizen Journalists
Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis.
Jan 31, 2026
On Sunday afternoon, CNN anchor Jake Tapper was interviewing US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hours after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. Suddenly, CNN cut away to live coverage of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. Noem declared that Pretti had “attacked our officers” while “brandishing” a handgun and planned “to kill law enforcement.” When a reporter tried to ask a question about her claim, she interrupted to say, “That is no claim. It is the facts.” When another reporter noted that the White House had just called Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” Noem forcefully agreed.
By this time, bystanders’ videos of the shooting were appearing online and on news outlets. When Tapper resumed his interview with Ocasio-Cortez, the representative said that Noem and the Trump administration were “asking the American people to not believe their eyes… to instead hand over your belief into anything that they say. I’m not asking the American people to believe me, or her, but to believe themselves.”
Any journalist who’s been paying attention knows that Noem’s boss, President Donald Trump, often doesn’t tell the truth. Trump launched his political career by asserting without evidence that America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the United States, which would have meant Barack Obama was in power illegally. After losing the 2020 election, Trump said he had no plans to leave office because, he insisted, he had actually won. Trump repeats that lie to this day, along with his claim that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to keep him in power was a day of “peace” and “love.”
But in spinning their latest web of lies, Trump and his aides didn’t reckon with the ingenuity and courage of Minnesotans who witnessed Border Control officers shooting Pretti—and Renee Good before him—and recorded the encounters on their cell phones. Without that evidence, the government’s version of the facts would have had the upper hand in shaping the public narrative. With that evidence, however, it’s obvious that “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked,” as Pretti’s “heartbroken but also very angry parents” wrote in a statement the next day. “He had his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down.” Likewise, bystander videos of Renee Good’s shooting show that she was turning her vehicle away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross when he fired three deadly shots through her windows.
Whether they know it or not, the bystanders who recorded these videos are citizen journalists. They are ordinary people, not trained in conventional journalism, and they were bearing witness to events of utmost importance to their community and country. And they were doing so under dangerous conditions, as was also exemplified by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who on May 25, 2020, bravely kept her cell phone focused on police officer Derek Chauvin throughout the nine minutes and 29 seconds that Chauvin’s knee was choking the life out of George Floyd.
The events of recent days have shown that citizen journalists, though not a substitute for professionals, can be an invaluable complement. Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis. We’d be hearing only the government’s version of the truth, which, given the Trump administration’s history of flagrant falsehoods, deserves extreme skepticism. Absent these videos, it is all but inconceivable that the editorial boards at three of America’s most influential newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—would be stating that the administration’s narrative defies belief or that the administration itself would be trying to walk back its initial slanders of Pretti.
All parts of the modern information system, from legacy newsrooms to social media influencers, can now present a fuller account of what is happening in Minnesota and let viewers and readers draw their own conclusions. And we can explore urgent questions raised by these videos, such as: How many more people might ICE agents have killed when no cameras were recording? Working in tandem at this critical moment for American democracy, citizen and professional journalists can fulfill the essential mission the nation’s founders envisioned for a free press: to inform the people and hold power to account.
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