NSA Section 215 Bulk Phone Metadata Collection Program Exposed
Disclosed by Edward Snowden in June 2013, the NSA's bulk collection of phone metadata on virtually all Americans under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act was later ruled illegal by a federal appeals court. Legal scholars argued the surveillance's scale had a documented chilling effect on journalist-source communications, attorney-client privilege, and political association.
On June 5, 2013, The Guardian published the first of Edward Snowden's leaked NSA documents, revealing that a secret FISA Court order had directed Verizon to turn over the phone metadata of millions of Americans to the NSA on an ongoing daily basis. Subsequent disclosures revealed the program, authorized under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, had been applied to all major U.S. telecommunications carriers since 2006. In 2015 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in ACLU v. Clapper that the bulk collection program exceeded the authority granted by Section 215. Congress curtailed the program through the USA FREEDOM Act in June 2015. Multiple peer-reviewed studies documented significant chilling effects: surveys of journalists found substantial changes in how they communicated with sources after the Snowden disclosures, and PEN America documented a marked increase in self-censorship among writers fearing government surveillance. The program remained secret for seven years, operating through a classified FISA Court process with no adversarial review.