4 November

Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) lets the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence, in order to acquire foreign intelligence information, target persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States who are not US persons, and direct an email, cloud or messaging provider in writing to help with the collection, so a non-US person in Asia who uses American services can be a target of such collection. The US president set up the National Security Agency (NSA) for the government's communications intelligence by a memorandum dated 24 October 1952 and held the formal announcement until Election Day, 4 November (per the NSA's page and FAS's Secrecy News citing the NSA, neither of which describes its role in Section 702 collection). A note in the US Code states that Section 702 was repealed effective 12 June 2026 except for transition procedures, and while we found no extension bill when we checked on 2 November, the Brennan Center, an advocacy group, wrote in June that collection would continue until March 2027. Apple's transparency report counts FISA court orders without saying which relate to Section 702, and to list content and non-content data (subscriber, transaction and connection data) separately the law requires it to report six months late in bands of 500, so we infer that you cannot tell from it whether your account is included. For readers in Taiwan, Article 7 of the Communication Security and Surveillance Act is a different rule that covers the communications of foreign forces, of hostile forces outside the territory, or of their personnel, rather than those of ordinary users, and it does not mention service providers (we summarize only its main conditions); for Section 702, none of the sources describe anything users can do to avoid collection.