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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (center), flanked by Attorney General Letitia James (right) and supporters, holds up one of two bills she signed in July 2024 aimed at protecting children and youth from the harmful effects of social media. Photo by Susan Watts/Office of New York Gov. Source

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (center), flanked by Attorney General Letitia James (right) and supporters, holds up one of two bills she signed in July 2024 aimed at protecting children and youth from the harmful effects of social media. Photo by Susan Watts/Office of New York Gov. 

As Age Assurance Moves Into Practice, What Can Policymakers Learn From New York?

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The landmark front entrance of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, the historic seat of the commonwealth government, on April 18, 2025. 

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This image is a section of the Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera, created between 1932 and 1933. Rivera, a renowned Mexican muralist, painted these panels inside the Detroit Institute of Arts. They are widely considered one of his greatest works and a landmark of 20th-century art.

The workers shown are laboring on automobile assembly lines, likely at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge Plant.

Rivera celebrated the dignity and effort of industrial labor, portraying the workers with strength and unity.

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Photograph of a detail of a 1933 Diego Rivera fresco at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Justin Hendrix/Tech Policy Press

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Amritha R Warrier & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / tic tac toe / CC-BY 4.0

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Age assurance is becoming a common component underlying youth online safety policy. Platforms are increasingly being required to provide different features, experiences, and protections for youth, such as usage limitations or prohibitions on nighttime notifications. The success of these interventions will depend in part on how companies determine which users qualify for them, making the concrete requirements governing age assurance systems a crucial part of implementation.

In the United States, these requirements are now being defined through legislation, regulation, and litigation. Last month, a landmark multi-state 

 with Meta established detailed requirements for the age assurance framework Meta must implement to determine which users receive the court-ordered protections. Last week, California lawmakers passed 

 that, if enacted, would prohibit social media platforms from offering certain addictive features to users under 16, with key implementation requirements currently under development by the state’s Attorney General. Together, these moves underscore a broader shift: as youth online safety mandates emerge across jurisdictions, policymakers, regulators, and courts must answer the harder implementation questions of how age assurance systems should work, how their performance should be measured, and how companies should be held accountable when they fail.

New York has already begun answering many of these questions. When its 

Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act

 passed in 2024, New York became one of the first states to task a public authority with writing rules governing how companies determine users’ ages online. The law, which is intended to limit social media companies’ use of certain “addictive” features for young users, directed the New York Attorney General to develop implementation rules that specify concrete requirements for age assurance. The 

, released on July 28, establish requirements governing the performance, evaluation, and oversight of age assurance systems used to implement the law. At a moment when similar requirements are taking shape elsewhere, New York provides an important early model for crafting age assurance governance, and lessons for how future approaches can improve.

The New York rules establish a solid foundation. They recognize that effective age assurance cannot be reduced to a simple, one-time compliance checkbox assessed by companies themselves. Instead, an effective regime requires ongoing evaluation of companies’ systems against multiple criteria that reflect tradeoffs among efficacy, availability, privacy, and other objectives. The New York rules also enable independent auditors, public authorities, and other actors to evaluate performance and hold companies accountable.

But New York’s approach also leaves important gaps that policymakers elsewhere can learn from. Future rules should give greater weight to the consequences of incorrectly classifying eligible users as ineligible, put more emphasis on the performance of age assurance systems as a whole in addition to individual age assurance methods, and require greater public transparency about how these systems perform in practice. Filling these gaps will help policymakers elsewhere build on New York’s approach and develop stronger models for age assurance implementation.

The rules recognize that age assurance requires balancing competing values.

In several places, New York’s rules implicitly acknowledge that age assurance requirements should not focus exclusively on preventing minors from accessing restricted features, but rather, should balance that objective against other considerations, including privacy, service availability, and burdens on adult users. For instance, the rules generally require covered operators offering an age assurance method that relies on a government ID to also offer at least one non-ID alternative. If all non-ID methods offered return inconclusive results, a user who declines to provide government ID can instead proceed to the appeals process. These provisions recognize that although government IDs can provide a highly accurate age signal, not all users have access to one or are comfortable providing it as part of an age verification process.

The rules also allow a user to be presumed an adult when: (1) every age assurance method offered produces an inconclusive result; and (2) the operator has no other actual knowledge that the user is a minor. These examples show that the New York rules do not treat efficacy as the only relevant objective, but one to be balanced with other values, such as access, user choice, and privacy.

The balance of values should be supported more comprehensively in future rules.

Future rules can do more to embed consideration for the balance of values consistently throughout their requirements. For example, under the New York rules, covered operators are generally not required to provide users with multiple age assurance options, even though different methods may impose different privacy, accessibility, or usability burdens. Offering multiple methods should be a baseline requirement.

Future rules should establish accuracy requirements for both false acceptances (minors falsely determined to be adults) and false rejections (adults falsely determined to be minors).

The New York rules require age assurance methods to meet accuracy standards for false acceptances and robustness standards against circumvention by minors. But they do not impose comparable standards for false rejections, which incentivizes covered operators to choose age assurance methods that are more likely to deny adults (and other eligible users) rightful access to age-gated features. In practice, covered operators need to balance access with the cost and operational complexity of offering multiple age assurance methods. It should not be assumed that compliance with the rules will naturally incentivize all covered platforms to make sufficiently accurate age assurance available.

The New York rules do require that false rejections be measured during certification and that covered operators offer users an appeal process to challenge incorrect determinations. Adding support for multiple methods and accuracy standards for false rejections would go further towards balancing availability with safety.

The rules establish performance standards and evaluation requirements for individual age assurance methods.

A strength of the rules is that they set concrete performance standards for individual age assurance methods and establish specific testing and annual third-party certification requirements for determining whether those standards are met. Method-level standards help ensure that covered operators do not rely on unproven, convenient, or easy-to-deploy approaches that perform poorly in practice. That is especially important where operators may offer users only one or two age assurance options, making the performance of each individual method consequential for whether users can successfully complete the process.

Future rules should be more comprehensive and precise about their measurement requirements.

In addition to individual method accuracy requirements, future rules should establish comparable end-to-end performance standards and evaluation requirements for the collection of methods offered by a covered provider. Doing so 

 because the accuracy of age assurance systems that route users across multiple methods cannot be inferred from evaluating individual methods alone. A system could rely on methods that each individually satisfy requirements while still performing poorly overall because of how those components interact in real-world use.

In addition to accuracy standards, the New York rules specify a quantitative circumvention detection threshold (98%). However, circumvention rates only make sense in the context of a specific set of circumvention techniques. Because some techniques are more effective than others, and defending against different techniques has different trade-offs when it comes to privacy and openness, any measurement of circumvention success inherently depends on the set of techniques tested and their frequency in the measurement set. 

, future rules should use qualitative circumvention detection and mitigation standards that are incorporated into the certification process. These qualitative standards could require covered platforms to take appropriate steps to mitigate the most prevalent circumvention risks.

The rules create a strong accountability structure.

The rules recognize that effective age assurance requires more from covered operators than a one-time compliance check. They create a multilayered accountability structure in which covered operators are responsible for ongoing monitoring, accredited third parties provide independent certification, users can challenge incorrect classifications, and information about newly discovered circumvention techniques can come from outside the company and trigger further investigation. In this respect, New York’s governance structure allows covered operators to adapt their age assurance systems as they learn from implementation, and it creates mechanisms for accountability that do not rely solely on companies policing themselves.

The rules stand to generate a substantial amount of potentially useful information about how age assurance systems function in real-world deployments. Certification reports must document testing protocols and results, including false acceptance rates, false rejection rates, inconclusive outcomes, and circumvention testing. Covered operators must also retain some forms of data, such as monthly attempts by method and monthly denials related to circumvention.

Accountability documentation should be made available to the public.

Neither the certification reports nor operators’ ongoing evaluations are required to be made public. As a result, much of what companies and auditors learn about where age assurance succeeds, where it fails, and how it affects users will remain confined to the companies, the auditors, and the Attorney General’s office, leaving researchers, civil society, and the public unable to evaluate those findings for themselves.

That limitation matters because age assurance is still an emerging area of policy and practice, and implementation will itself generate evidence that could improve future rule updates, regulation, or technical system designs. If those results remain private, the public has little basis for assessing whether the rules are working, and independent researchers cannot contribute expert analysis to the AG’s enforcement of the rules. Future rules should require that certification reports include all data necessary for independent evaluation of age assurance systems, and that they be made public.

New York’s rules provide an important early model for translating age assurance mandates into concrete, enforceable requirements. As courts, regulators, and lawmakers confront the same implementation questions, they can build on the strengths of the New York rules while addressing their gaps – particularly around balancing access with other considerations, including privacy, service availability, and burdens on adult users; evaluating how age assurance systems perform as a whole; and enabling transparency and meaningful independent scrutiny. Getting these details right will be critical to having age assurance serve as an effective component of youth online safety rather than simply another compliance requirement.

An undeleted line from an AI prompt was found in a post on a Chinese content farm. The prompt instructed writers to target a Taiwanese audience, rewrite the article in Traditional Chinese while preserving historical accuracy, and limit it to 500 words. The line was deleted within two minutes of publication but remained in the post’s editing history, where it was identified by the research team led by 

, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and RAND. The incident has since been logged in the 

 and reported by multiple Taiwanese news outlets.

This evidence points specifically to an effort to produce content for a Taiwanese audience. It provides stronger evidence of Taiwan-specific targeting than of an operation aimed at Traditional Chinese-language readers in general.

This kind of coordination is already documented. 

, documenting its disruption of a network originating in China that targeted audiences in Taiwan. The cluster accounts used Taiwan-based proxy IPs to appear to be of Taiwanese origin, engaging in the promotion of pro-Beijing narratives and criticizing the Taiwanese ruling party across several Facebook pages. The network disguised itself as legitimate advertisers by paying the 

 in Hong Kong Dollars, Chinese Yuan, and Taiwan New Dollars.

While this particular network appears to have relied on manual coordination and proxy IPs, other PRC-linked operations have incorporated language models in their campaigns. Powered by generative AI, these campaigns used large language models for content creation and strategic planning, as documented in OpenAI's 

 on covert ChatGPT-assisted campaigns targeting Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and US policy debates. Together, these reports show that AI-assisted operations are cross-border efforts.

Apart from coordinating account activities, AI is also being used to create misleading video content. The 

Australian Strategic Policy Institute found

 an information campaign during the Taiwan election in 2024, in which the CCP's largest network of inauthentic social media accounts, known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, used AI-generated news anchors to spread and amplify content from what's called "The Secret History of (outgoing president) Tsai Ing-wen.” The incident was also documented in a 

. The analysis shows the campaign "had limited reach, with practically no engagement from organic users." 

, a Northeast Asia analyst at the Belgium-based International Crisis Group, said the election interference efforts from China will certainly be on the rise, with the assistance of advanced AI technology. This raises a question: if these campaigns rarely convince anyone, why do they persist?

 China’s goal is to distract the public and change the subject. Even when people are aware that content can be fabricated, as fake material becomes easier to produce, they may grow increasingly unwilling to believe anything at all. This is sometimes called the “liar’s dividend”— the ability to dismiss genuine evidence as fake simply because fake evidence is now easy to produce. 

 how generative AI can make this problem worse.

Currently, most reports released by these AI companies or social media platforms focus on identifying which actors did what and blocking them, without examining collaborative behavior patterns to analyze how the operations work and what intents are involved. AI companies and social media platforms should not only censor harmful speech, but also examine how these accounts operate together.

For example, coordinated actions that use narratives targeting specific country policies within a short period reveal transnational interference intent. 

 that their focus on behavior rather than content has appeared effective, a conclusion 

 have echoed. However, neither has this approach become an established standard among these companies, nor has it brought enough transparency.

 to combat disinformation by legally requiring Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) to assess and mitigate risks to public discourse. In the US, the proposed 

Platform Accountability and Transparency Act (PATA)

 would require large social media platforms to open their data to independent researchers and the public.

Taiwan has not been inactive. In 2022, the National Communications Commission 

 to regulate platforms, but it never reached the legislature amid concerns over freedom of speech. Ahead of Taiwan’s 2026 year-end elections, the 

District Prosecutors’ Office has established a special task force

Ministry of Digital Affairs plans to launch a reporting network

However, the focus of these mechanisms remains on identifying the fake content itself, and has not yet addressed how that content is distributed, amplified, and coordinated. Taiwan has taken part in a 

GCTF (Global Cooperation and Training Framework) workshop

 with the US and other partners this July, addressing the misuse of AI, deepfakes, and disinformation. The next step should be to bring the distribution and coordination models outlined here into that existing dialogue.

These efforts matter, but none of them will be enough unless they can match the scale of the threat. The threat lies not in the fabricated content itself, but in the scale, speed

and coordination of the operation behind it

The author is a member of the policy research team for the 

, and is the lead author of the report discussed in this piece.

As social media platforms increasingly shape how people are informed, connected and, at times, harmed online, governments are also intervening more directly in these environments, particularly where children are concerned. Meta 

, subject to court approval, to a package of new safety measures for teenagers in the United States, including default time limits and restrictions on late-night use, as part of a multi-billion-dollar settlement of litigation alleging harm to young users. The UK government has said it expects 

similar protections to extend to UK users.

For researchers, however, these developments raise a further question: once these interventions are in place, who will be able to independently establish whether they are working and how? Answering that question largely depends on access to social media data that has become harder to obtain. Twitter, now X, 

withdrew its free research API for academic researchers in 2023

, a widely used transparency tool, the following year. This "post-API" environment has created a growing mismatch between the demand for independent evidence about platforms and the routes available to researchers to produce it.

 set out to examine: how researchers studying online harms can gain reliable access to the data they need. Established by 

and co-chaired by the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, the Taskforce has spent the past year bringing researchers, regulators, funders and civil society together. Its final report, scheduled to launch on Wednesday, reaches a central conclusion: there is unlikely to be one mechanism capable of meeting the range of research needs involved. What is needed instead is a layered approach, in which different routes to data progress alongside one another and at different speeds.

The UK is not the only one considering these questions. In the United States, the bipartisan 

Platform Accountability and Transparency Act

 has been reintroduced in the Senate. The Knight-Georgetown Institute's recent 

 report similarly proposes multiple complementary mechanisms for independent access to high-influence public platform data.

The European Union has taken a different approach. 

 established a statutory mechanism through which vetted researchers can request access to non-public data from very large online platforms and search engines. Its early implementation is also providing useful lessons about the practical challenge of translating a statutory entitlement into functioning access. For the UK, these developments provide experience from which to learn. They also arrive at a point when the legislative foundations for building the UK's own researcher-access environment are increasingly in place. This creates an opportunity to think about the eventual architecture of access and about what can be improved in the meantime.

The Taskforce examined three routes in detail: public-interest web scraping, data donation and an independent statutory data intermediary. These are sometimes discussed as alternative models. Our work suggests that they are better understood as complementary parts of a wider research infrastructure.

Web scraping is already an established research method and remains one of the few ways researchers can independently collect publicly accessible platform data. Its principal challenge lies in making an existing method more predictable and sustainable, rather than in creating a new access mechanism altogether. In the near term, the report identifies clearer regulatory guidance specifically for public-interest social media research. Over the medium term, a statutory safe harbor could provide more durable legal certainty.

offers something different: a way for individuals to voluntarily contribute their own platform data to research. Its strategic potential lies in moving from a fragmented, largely retrospective process towards a more standardized form of research access. The report therefore sets out a progression from clarifying and standardizing existing processes, through better routes for delegation and redress, towards more continuous forms of donation. Over the longer term, the UK's new 

 could possibly offer a route towards more systematic, API-based portability for research.

An independent data intermediary is the most substantial piece of new infrastructure considered in the report. It could provide an independent route to data that researchers cannot obtain through scraping or donation and reduce dependence on individual arrangements between researchers and platforms. The 

has already created powers to establish a researcher-access framework for research into online safety matters.

But establishing an intermediary necessarily takes time. Decisions are still required about its governance, funding, technical design and relationship with both platforms and researchers. This is why the report proposes a staged approach: establishing the legal and governance foundations first, learning from existing UK and international data infrastructures, involving researchers in its design and ultimately creating a statutory intermediary.

The strategic point is that all three mechanisms solve different problems. Scraping enables independent research using public data, while data donation allows people to contribute their own. An intermediary, in turn, could enable access to platform-held data that is not publicly available or obtainable through individual data donation. Some improvements can also be made now using existing institutions and powers, while more ambitious infrastructure will take longer to build. But developing and combining these three models matters more than choosing among them.

The research community is part of the infrastructure

But data-access infrastructure is only useful if researchers are equipped to use it. Creating better routes for accessing platform data will not ensure by itself that all researchers are able to use them. The Taskforce's work over the last year concluded that the UK research community shares many of the same challenges but does not always address them collectively. Approaches to legal uncertainty, institutional risk and emerging research methods can differ considerably between organizations. Larger universities may also have access to specialist legal and technical resources that smaller institutions, charities and independent researchers do not.

The report therefore makes recommendations to the research community and its funders alongside those directed at government and regulators. The strategy has three parts: the adoption of more consistent approaches to recurring access problems, the strengthening of legal, ethical and technical skills, as well as the building of longer-term forms of collective support.

This includes practical training and resources, clearer institutional positions on research methods such as public-interest scraping, greater collaboration with international research infrastructures and, ultimately, a legal defense fund and coordination mechanism for researchers facing platform action. The broader point is that access infrastructure is not only technical or legislative. It is also institutional. A formal right or mechanism for accessing data has limited value if only a small number of well-resourced researchers have the confidence, expertise or institutional support required to use it.

 has already concluded that no single model is likely to meet the full range of researcher needs, pointing instead towards a layered and flexible approach. The Taskforce's work builds on that conclusion by considering what the different layers might require and how they could evolve over time. The government's forthcoming consultation on researcher access therefore comes at an important point. The UK now has the opportunity to consider longer-term infrastructure alongside measures that could strengthen existing research methods, while also learning from approaches under way in the United States and European Union.

The report's recommendations distinguish between what can be clarified using existing powers, what requires further regulatory or legislative development and what requires new infrastructure, reflecting that different parts of this system are ready to advance on different timelines. As the UK's online safety framework matures, the need for independent evidence about online harms will grow alongside it. The challenge is now to build an environment where different forms of responsible access to that evidence can develop together, matched by a research community with the capacity to use them.

Jake Laperruque is a fellow at Tech Policy Press. 

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

, a Democrat from California, about the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and ongoing efforts to reform it. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

I'm really delighted to be joined here today by Representative Zoe Lofgren. She's a longtime champion on privacy, surveillance, and a whole host of technology issues. Congresswoman Lofgren, thank you so much for joining us today.

Great. So we're going to talk today primarily about FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, specifically the warrantless provision of FISA, FISA Section 702.

So for listeners who aren't too familiar with FISA in general or aren't too familiar with FISA 702, could you give them just a brief summary of what this surveillance authority is, and why Congress needs to take action on this issue?

702 of FISA allows the government to collect communications of non-Americans located overseas, and it's supposed to be for foreign intelligence purposes without an individualized warrant for each target. It can be an important national security tool, and I'm not suggesting that it be eliminated.

And the reason why you don't need a warrant is the Constitution protects everyone in the United States from unreasonable search and seizure. But if you're abroad and you're not an American, it doesn't protect you.

The problem is that you're catching Americans who might be on one end of the communication, and when they do, they become part of a database. And once that database is in place, it can be queried for information. And it's not just call data, it's the substance. It's emails, it's telephone calls, it's everything without a warrant.

And in fact, this has happened in the past where the FBI goes in and does a warrantless search of the database for Americans' communications without a warrant, and certainly without even the need for a foreign policy purpose. So it's a loophole and it needs to be closed.

United States Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) speaking at a hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Energy at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on September 2, 2026. (Photo by Michael Brochstein/Sipa via AP Images)


And so just to dig in a little on that querying process where the FBI and other agencies, as you're saying, they go and they say, "Well, the American wasn't a target, but hey, pull up all the American's emails from our databases. We want to read all of Jake's emails. We want to read all of Congresswoman Lofgren's emails."

I mean, is that a rare thing or are they doing this as standard practice once they've grabbed all these emails with the warrant, well, not all your emails, but grabbed all emails that could be collected from this Foreign Surveillance Authority?

It's not rare. It's not rare. We do have some data. The data is subject to some skepticism given what the FBI and others have done, but backdoor searches have been used improperly for protestors, 19,000 campaign donors, members of Congress, journalists, government officials, a state court judge who had complained to the FBI about police misconduct. It has been abused substantially in the past.

Now, the government argues that that's no problem now. All those problems have been resolved, but I can't discuss the classified FISA court ruling. Ron Wyden and I have tried to get it released, but I will just say this: the information that is being promulgated by the government is probably not accurate.

And just to follow up on that, because I obviously can't speak to anything that classified's saying, but can describe what's been in public reporting on this.

Correct. That's all I'm able to do as well.

Yeah, which there was a FISA court opinion from I believe last March that basically said through filtering processes and tools, there's what the FISA court seems to believe are queries happening but aren't being counted as queries.

Correct, correct. That's what the public reporting has been. I want to be very cautious not to discuss the classified document.

Yeah, of course. And that's the sort of thing I think all of us working on this space or interested in this space that can't see behind that classification wall would love to have access to that opinion and know the details of what's going on, but unfortunately we haven't been able to.

Well, and in my judgment, there's no reason in the world why that opinion should not be released, but it's not been released.

So FISA, it's been on and off on Congress's agenda throughout this year. It's been a big item in the news because there's a deadline for FISA 702, and that deadline actually has passed, although current surveillance is ongoing because of basically the orders that were already in effect, they go for the duration of those orders, which goes into early next year.

Because of this deadline, it's been a big item on Congress's plate and probably will come back up again at some point in the next few months because of that looming expiration of the current surveillance.

These days it really feels like there's just so many major news events every day, things that would be a front page story for a week or the fifth-biggest story of the day when we're dealing with so many issues that aren't just important but seem really critical to our society and our democracy.

Why is FISA reform and this component of FISA that targets foreigners something that the American public should feel is a priority to talk about, and to spend our time in, and for Congress to spend its time on?

Well, for one thing, as I said initially, there is value in Section 702 when it comes to foreign intelligence. So I'm not proposing that this section be eliminated, but I am insistent that the privacy rights, constitutional rights of Americans be respected.

And there's an easy way to do that: before you query the database for an American, get a warrant. People get warrants in cities and counties and states all over the United States every day, and there's no reason why not to do it in this case.

And so as I mentioned, this is something that Congress has been voting on, but there hasn't been a vote on that concept yet this year, has there?

The idea of, "Well, maybe we extend this authority, but we say if you're doing these queries, you're looking for Americans, you have to get a warrant."

Well, they pulled the bill because I think Johnson realized that we had the votes, and so here we are in limbo.

I think the proponents of the status quo were believing that if they played chicken and said the FISA authority will expire, that the constitutional rights people would fade away. That did not happen. As you correctly point out, the programs that have been authorized continue, those don't stop, but ultimately this will come to a head.

We've had over the years successful votes in the House. I think the first one was the Tom Massie and I had an amendment more than a decade ago that passed. And I'm expecting that if we have that question put to the House that it will pass. I can't ever speak for the Senate.

So before diving in a little further on FISA, I want to step back and look at privacy and surveillance more generally because this is a topic that you've been a champion on for so long.

As a general matter, the frame we often hear from folks when discussing privacy is, "I've got nothing to hide, nothing to hide, nothing to fear." How would you respond when you hear that sort of mentality about surveillance issues and about whether we should have surveillance reform as a policy priority?

Well, there are exceptions to the warrant requirement in law. One is exigent circumstances and the other is consent.

And so if someone wants to consent to the government reading all their emails and listening to all their phone calls, fine, they're free to do that, but that should not void the Constitution when it comes to the rest of us.

So basically, this is something that you should care about as a right, even if you don't care about it for yourself, you should care about it-

Yeah. If the individuals want to give the government carte blanche to take all their private information, that's up to them. I don't plan on doing that myself.

So a flip side of that, that nothing to hide, nothing to fear mentality is you'll also hear individuals sometimes say, "Well, I think tech companies are always snooping on me. Social media is collecting my data. I have ads that are so tailored to my conversations around the dinner table that I think my phone is probably wiretapped and listening to me, and I'm always being watched and privacy's dead. There's so much surveillance. Why should I care about government surveillance?"

How do you convince people with that view of privacy that these debates are still worth having and fighting for?

Well, two things. First, people are right to be concerned about privacy. The tech world is collecting information about you, and there are bills that have been introduced.

My Online Privacy Act would give users meaningful rights over their personal information and require companies to minimize data they collect and retain and could only use it for the purposes that it was collected for. That bill has not been made into law, and hopefully it will.

But there's a difference between the government collecting information about you and Meta collecting information about you. The government can arrest you and put you in prison. Meta can't do that.

I'm curious, do you think in general that people are more apathetic about privacy now than they used to be with tech as just an….?

I have no idea what people generally think. All I can do is stand up for the Constitution.

So as far as standing up for it in terms of FISA in particular, this is an issue that FISA reform that's always gotten quite good bipartisan support.

There's been Democrats and Republicans working together on past reforms that we've won on FISA surveillance reforms. And also it's something that for the current fight that's been going on this year on that, there's also been a lot of bipartisan supporting cooperation.

So I'm kind of curious to look at that as a model when our politics are so incredibly polarized, probably the most polarized they've been in my life and many people's lives.

How does surveillance reform manage to be so bipartisan? And are there lessons that policymakers and folks across DC should learn from this issue about how to function in a more bipartisan way?

Well, I think the first effort that was made on this in the House was by myself and Thomas Massie. And I didn't know Thomas at the time.

Actually, he came up to me on the floor and he said, "Is Tesla in your district?" And I said, "No, it's just outside my district." And he said, "Well, I have a Tesla." I said, "Well, good for you." And I went back, "Who is this guy?" So I looked him up and he's got two degrees from MIT. He's an engineer. Geeky as all get out. I don't agree with Thomas on a whole bunch of things, guns and other things. But one thing about Thomas is that he is not intimidated, and when he finds that there's something that he thinks is the right thing to do, he does it.

And so he was a perfect partner to work on this, and we treated it. We never had an opportunity actually to vote on it in the House. And I had the lawyers on my staff basically brief the parliamentarian, and we spent a month submitting briefs and cases and authority so that we knew that we had the ability to actually have our amendment heard, first time it was ever heard. And the proponents of FISA, I mean, it just went nuts, but when we were able to get it on the floor, it made sense to everybody.

I think it's a coalition of civil libertarians on the Democratic side and Tea Party constitutionalists on the Republican side. And one of the lessons I've learned is that you don't have to agree with somebody on other items. Focus on the things that you agree on and work on that and disagree on the other things, but don't let that prevent you from achieving something when you agree.

And it's really interesting because I feel like a lot of the time in these discussions about surveillance and why we worry about it, both Democrats and Republicans alike will refer to things, "Oh, I'm really worried about being tracked going to an abortion clinic," or "I'm really concerned about the government watching me and logging me going to a gun show."

Things that really are those hot-button partisan issues. But I think that there always seems to be this understanding of, "Well, we care about the broader principle for surveillance," which is just very interesting.

I think the way for some people to think about it is some of my friends on the Republican right are still enamored of Donald Trump. Maybe they don't care if Donald Trump knows everything personal about them, but pretend it's a liberal Democratic president. Do they feel the same way?

The rule of law protects everyone. It shouldn't change because of which party or which person is in office.

It's one of those you can always very easily imagine the shoe being on the other foot, even if you're not concerned about the current person in office.

So kind of a wrinkle for that aspect of it, and just the bipartisan nature of this means we've always got some members of Congress who are supporting FISA reform or are considering supporting FISA reform who are in the party opposing the current president and are especially keyed in to worry about abuse.

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