US says wiretap program thwarted attack on 2024 Taylor Swift Concert

WASHINGTON —Intelligence collected using a high-profile warrantless surveillance program helped thwart a planned terrorist attack on a 2024 Taylor Swift concert in Austria, the CIA said on Friday, as the Trump administration stepped up its campaign urging Congress to extend the law underlying the program.

The agency also said the program, known as Section 702, had helped Mexico find and kill the leader of one of its largest cartels. It declassified the information about ways the program had been used as lawmakers weighed whether or how to pass legislation extending the statute, which is set to expire on April 20.

Privacy advocates in both parties want to impose new limits on surveillance and data collection affecting Americans as part of any measure extending the program, while the Trump administration and national security hawks in both parties want Congress to push off the statute’s expiration date without changes.

Against that backdrop, the administration has also disclosed to Congress that the nation’s intelligence court last month reapproved the program to operate for another year.

The annual recertification, issued last month in a classified ruling, means that the program can continue to collect phone calls and emails through March 2027 — even if Congress fails later this month to renew the statute that underlies it.

But the judge who issued the March 17 ruling also objected to tools that agencies with access to the raw data — like the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency — have created to allow analysts to process messages, according to unclassified talking points the administration sent to lawmakers in recent days.

Those talking points, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, did not explain what the judge took issue with. A person familiar with the matter said the problem involved filtering systems that allow analysts to pare down the broader results of a query focused on a foreigner in order to get the information of specific people who communicated with that foreigner.

When such a filter is used to look for the messages of an American, the court ruled, that counts as a query for Americans’ information, which is subject to extra limits.

The court’s ruling requires the agencies to reengineer the filter tools to comply with rules for queries for Americans’ information, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. If the government does not, it apparently must stop using the functions.

The administration is still weighing whether to comply or appeal, the talking points said.

Section 702 allows the government to collect — on domestic soil and without a warrant — the communications of foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Under the law, the National Security Agency can order email providers like Google and network operators like AT&T to turn over messages of targeted foreigners.

The program is a major source of foreign intelligence, counterterrorism and counterespionage information. In 2025, there were 349,823 foreigners targeted under the program, up from 291,824 in 2024, according to recently declassified surveillance data.

Congress first enacted the statute in 2008, legalizing a form of a once-secret warrantless wiretapping program that the Bush administration established after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Lawmakers built an expiration date into the statute to ensure periodic review, and it has been renewed and tweaked several times.

The Trump administration wants Congress to extend the statute without changes. But privacy advocates in both parties want to require the government to get warrants before gaining access to Americans’ communications in the Section 702 repository, and to ban it from buying Americans’ data from brokers if it would need a warrant to obtain that information directly.

As the deadline approaches, both sides have intensified their lobbying. The CIA declassified the use of the program in the matters involving the Taylor Swift concert and the Mexican drug cartel, then released them as part of a fact sheet, which was earlier reported by Politico.

In both those cases, it was known that the CIA had helped gather critical intelligence, but officials had not revealed that secret communications intercepts were key parts of the information.

The fact sheet also stated that the program had been used to track chemicals shipped from China used to make fentanyl, and to help Mexico locate fentanyl production facilities in the country.

The court’s finding of the filtering problem could give privacy advocates a new counterargument. Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice said it “undermines the core case for a straight reauthorization of Section 702, which is that agencies’ queries over the past two years have all been aboveboard, carefully tracked and fully reported.”

But the new annual certification could provide something of a safety valve. A key provision in the statute says that, notwithstanding anything else in the law, its orders, authorizations and directives “shall continue in effect” until their expiration dates. That means the program can likely continue operating until the certifications expire in March 2027, even if Congress allowed the underlying statute to lapse earlier.

Still, when Section 702 last came up for reauthorization in April 2024, the Biden administration warned against letting the statute lapse even briefly. Officials said some providers might cease cooperation, and even if the government went to court to compel their continued compliance, there could be gaps in data collection before orders took effect.

The government typically declassifies and releases a redacted version of the annual court rulings on the Section 702 program. Those opinions usually detail compliance incidents over the previous year in which agencies violated the rules for the program in important ways, even if inadvertently.

But it usually takes months for the rulings to be declassified and released, meaning that even if lawmakers choose to read the ruling, the public is unlikely to see what the court said about compliance incidents in 2025 before Congress votes.

A declassified version of the court’s ruling from March 2025, which was made public last September, revealed that a system used by FBI analysts had an “advanced filtering function” that let them view, via a drop-down menu, messages of specific people who had been in contact with foreign targets the analysts had queried.

In 2024, the Justice Department became aware of how that function sometimes let analysts see collected messages of Americans who had been in contact with the foreign target. But those views were not being logged or counted as queries for an American’s information, so the reported numbers were off, and there was no way to go back and audit them for compliance with heightened limits. The FBI deactivated the function.

In referring to the newly identified problem in this year’s ruling, the talking points described it only as “discrete technical capabilities, which are unique across the different agencies that access 702 data.” But the person familiar with the matter said that it was similar to the problem with the FBI filtering tool, and that the newly disclosed issue applied across the intelligence community, including another tool being used by the bureau.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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