On April 15, the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) came out in opposition to the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 program. The NAGR statement naturally raises a question: do American gun owners, gun store operators, competition shooters, and even Olympians who participate in the shooting sports have anything to fear from the Section 702 program?
Yes.
The Basic Threat
FISA Section 702 authorizes the NSA to collect the communications of foreign nationals located outside the United States without a warrant. Inevitably, Section 702 “upstream” collection sweeps the internet backbone, capturing not just the foreign target’s communications but any American communications that cross paths with them. The FBI, CIA, NSA, and National Counterterrorism Center can then query that collected data using American identifiers — names, email addresses, phone numbers — without obtaining a warrant.
A federal court has already ruled this practice unconstitutional. In United States v. Hasbajrami (E.D.N.Y., December 2, 2024), Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall held that §702 database queries on US persons constitute a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. Congress is voting this week on whether to reauthorize §702 — potentially without any warrant requirement — before that ruling works its way through the appellate courts. (Source: Lawfare analysis of Hasbajrami ruling.)
Why Competitive Shooters Are Specifically Vulnerable — The International Competition Pipeline
American competitive shooters who participate in international matches generate exactly the kind of international communications that §702 upstream collection is capable of sweeping up — and their identities, firearms data, and travel patterns potentially go with them into warrantlessly queryable government databases.
The International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) — the Olympic governing body for shooting sports — affiliates 163 national shooting federations from 149 countries, headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its membership spans the globe, including national shooting federations from countries that are active NSA collection targets. The 2025 ISSF World Championships in Cairo drew 720 athletes from 70 nations, with China topping the medal tally and Iran, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan among the participating nations.
The International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) — the world’s largest practical shooting sport organization — operates through more than 100 national member regions with over 250,000 registered members worldwide. Its electronic scoring system is actively used by member regions, including China and Saudi Arabia, among others. The 2025 IPSC Handgun World Shoot in South Africa drew more than 1,600 competitors from over 80 countries. Prior World Shoots were held in Thailand (2022) and — critically — Russia (2017), where American competitors communicated directly with Russian government-affiliated entities at the Patriot Park military facility near Moscow.
Every American competitive shooter traveling to an international match must navigate a documented chain of international communications and government interactions that creates plausible §702 incidental collection exposure:
Federal export compliance. American sportsmen traveling internationally with firearms and ammunition must comply with the Arms Export Control Act, International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Export Control Reform Act, Export Administration Regulations, and customs laws. Export regulations apply to any removal of firearms from US territorial boundaries, regardless of transportation mode, including commercial air travel. This requires communications with federal licensing authorities and, in many cases, direct correspondence with foreign government entities regarding import authorization.
Foreign government firearms permits. For the 2025 IPSC PCC/Mini Rifle World Shoot in the Czech Republic, US competitors were required to submit applications for “Gun Way Bills” — firearms transport permits — directly to Czech government authorities, communicating personal identifying information and detailed firearms data to a foreign government entity.
International registration databases. Every competitor’s registration data — name, nationality, contact information, division, and equipment specifications — flows through IPSC’s international registration systems, headquartered in Spain and Sweden, and is accessible to host nation match organizations.
The §702 incidental collection mechanism: If NSA is incidentally collecting communications to or from the ISSF’s Munich headquarters, IPSC’s international servers, host nation match organizations, or national shooting federations of countries that are active collection targets — all entirely plausible given documented NSA collection practices — the registration and communications data of American competitive shooters could be swept up without a warrant and become queryable by FBI analysts under the current no-warrant-required regime. This is not a certainty but a well-grounded risk inherent in how §702 upstream collection operates.
The Foreign Industry Pipeline — A Second Vulnerability
The international firearms, accessories, and ammunition industries represent a second, largely overlooked §702 collection surface area directly affecting American gun owners and dealers.
Major firearms manufacturers supplying the American civilian market are headquartered abroad: Glock in Austria, Heckler & Koch and Sig Sauer’s parent company in Germany, Beretta, Benelli, and Fabarm in Italy, IWI in Israel, and CZ in the Czech Republic — the latter serving as the official match sponsor for the 2025 IPSC Handgun World Shoot. Each maintains U.S. subsidiaries and distribution operations generating ongoing international communications covering distributor lists, dealer networks, customer data, import records, and inventory.
These foreign-to-US-subsidiary communications are precisely the kind of international business communications that §702 upstream incidental collection could capture. If NSA is targeting any of these foreign parent entities — or their host governments’ communications infrastructure — for legitimate foreign intelligence purposes, the incidental collection of their US subsidiaries’ and distribution chains’ communications could sweep in data that maps directly to American firearms dealers, distributors, and potentially end customers.
The same logic applies to foreign optics manufacturers competing in the American market, foreign ammunition manufacturers with US distribution chains, and foreign-owned accessories suppliers. The American firearms market is deeply internationalized, and the communications infrastructure connecting foreign manufacturers to American dealers and consumers runs across exactly the international backbone that §702 upstream collection taps.
The Five-Year Retention Problem — A Cumulative Database Effect
Under current law, the problem facing American competitive shooters and gun owners doesn’t reset after each competition season — it compounds.
The government’s publicly available minimization procedures confirm that, with limited exceptions, the Intelligence Community may retain unreviewed §702 collection for up to 5 years. The NSA shares raw data with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies, and all retain it for that functional minimum of five years.
This means that as each new class of American competitive shooters enters international competition and engages in communications with foreign shooting federations, government permitting authorities, and international match organizations, their data is added to a rolling archive alongside data from previous collection cycles. A shooter who competed at the 2022 IPSC World Shoot in Thailand, the 2024 IPSC Rifle World Shoot in Finland, and the 2025 IPSC Handgun World Shoot in South Africa could have communications from multiple collection cycles sitting in warrantlessly queryable government databases at the same time. The database doesn’t empty between competitions — under current law, it accumulates.
Moreover, in practice, §702 minimization procedures permit the government to amass large volumes of communications and retain them for years even absent a determination that they contain foreign intelligence information. And data that has been reviewed and affirmatively tagged as containing foreign intelligence relevance — even tangentially — may be retained beyond the five-year baseline under current agency minimization procedures, though the precise retention criteria vary by agency and some operational details remain classified.
Without a warrant requirement and without a mandatory purge provision for US person data lacking a demonstrated foreign intelligence nexus, §702 databases don’t function as targeted intelligence tools for incidentally collected American data. They function as continuously updated, warrantlessly searchable archives — ones that grow with every World Shoot, every ISSF World Championship, and every international transaction between a US firearms dealer and a foreign manufacturer.
Conclusion
A mandatory purge provision — requiring destruction of US person data that cannot be connected to communications with a foreign power or agent of a foreign power within a defined timeframe — would further limit the cumulative database effect described above, ensuring that incidentally collected data on innocent American gun owners does not sit indefinitely in warrantlessly searchable government archives.
The new FISA Section 702 bill introduced by the House GOP leadership contains no warrant requirement for Section 702 database searches and no mandatory purge provision, which leaves all of these vulnerabilities fully intact. The procedural rule to move that bill forward was defeated 197–228 by a coalition of 208 Democrats and 20 GOP members, though a short term extension of the existing program through April 30 did pass, which the Senate will also have to clear. The fight over the long term fate and shape of the Section 702 program will resume next week.
