Lawmakers have failed to extend a surveillance law that allows US intelligence agencies to monitor targets abroad without a warrant.

Congress rejected a vote to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to July 2, which means, for a few days at least, some surveillance will be put on hold, for the first time since the Act was passed in 2008. The next possible chance for a vote will be June 28.

This has significance for CISOs because they need to be aware of how communication between the US and other countries is being monitored. The Act permits US intelligence agencies to collect texts and emails sent to and from foreigners living outside the US without a warrant — and when those communications are to or from an US citizen, it allows them to scoop them up too.

“For too long, the FBI has been able to piggyback on a major national security tool as an unconstitutional backdoor way of reading Americans’ communications,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia wrote in article about the renewal vote this week.

It is uncertain what will happen next. Some commentators expect things will proceed as if the Act had been extended, possibly through an executive order.  However, the industry may well revolt against this and we could see some tech providers take legal action.

This article first appeared on CSO.

An intruder has breached the French government’s encrypted messaging service, Tchap, showing once again that human error is a weak spot in any security system.

Tchap was developed in France as an example of national sovereignty and was designed to be a more secure option than WhatsApp for communication between government employees.

In this case, it wasn’t the technology that was at fault, but a user: The intruder gained access to the system by taking over their account, according to DINUM, the French government’s interministerial digital directorate.

DINUM said it has blocked the affected user’s access and is investigating how much information has been revealed. While the system’s encryption was not broken, the intruder would have been able to view unencrypted public chat rooms accessible to the account taken over, potentially affecting 73,467 of the system’s 825,000 users, DINUM said.

That matches at least part of a post on X (formerly Twitter) reporting the intruder’s claim to have accessed the account of a Tchap user in the education sector through social engineering, exposing 73,467 user accounts, 643,459 messages, 876 chat rooms with message history, and 59,386 media files totalling 13.51 GB, including references to documents marked “Diffusion Restreinte” (restricted distribution).

DINUM said that it had reminded all Tchap users that public chat rooms are accessible to any user and are not encrypted, so all participants should refrain from any sensitive or confidential information.

This article first appeared on CSO.