Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has waltzed into her new role as director of national intelligence, a position that has got privacy advocates raising their eyebrows. While she’s softened some of her previous over-the-top anti-surveillance rhetoric, Gabbard is still hanging onto a promise to bring some much-needed transparency to a controversial US surveillance program.

At the forefront of this push are at least 20 civil liberties groups, led by the ACLU, who are relentless in urging Gabbard to pull back the curtain on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This integral piece of legislation is essentially the government’s BFF when it comes to wiretapping, they claim it’s for “foreign threats” but let’s be real, it’s also been known to scoop up a boatload of communications among everyday Americans.

Yeah, nothing like a little spying to keep that civil liberties flame flickering, right? The call for transparency includes declassifying which US businesses can now be forced to help the NSA wiretap. You’d think after the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco, our government would be inclined to tread lightly on the privacy front, but nope! Congress decided to expand this program, ignoring legal warnings about the rise in wiretaps of ordinary citizens’ communications.

Rumors abound that the government’s intention behind this new “electronic communications service provider” (ECSP) designation is to allow it to access even more Intel stashed in data centers. This is the kind of vague jurisdiction that should terrify anyone who values their privacy. Senator Ron Wyden, known for his privacy advocacy, didn’t mince words, calling these changes “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history”.

The ACLU isn’t just stopping at transparency; they want Gabbard to quantify how many Americans have been “incidentally” wiretapped. Intelligence officials claim this is impossible, you know, because it would involve, gasp, actually accessing data that could violate Americans’ rights. So basically, Gabbard is in quite the pickle: her recent landing in the big chair could mean she’ll either push for the very transparency that empowers civil liberties or just become another cog in the surveillance machine.

As the clock ticks toward the reauthorization discussion looming on the horizon, privacy advocates are keeping their fingers crossed that Gabbard will remember her promises of reform. If not, we might just be in for another round of government overreach camouflaged as national security.

Let’s hope Tulsi’s got more fight in her than just supporting reforms in theory.