124 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
future use. Soon afterward, Congress replaced the Patriot Act with the USA Freedom Act, which effectively transferred bulk storage of billing records from the NSA to the phone companies themselves. Despite the change in venue, the records of individuals were still not completely private. Under the new law, the FBI via a FISA warrant could still search the phone company’s databases.
The core of Snowden’s charge in the media was that the FISA court overreached its authority by issuing sweeping warrants that allowed the NSA to obtain data collected by private phone and Inter- net companies. In the initial story published in The Guardian on June 6, Snowden disclosed one such FISA warrant to support his charge. It was issued by Judge Roger Vinson of the FISA court on April 25, 2013, and ordered Verizon to turn over to the FBI all its billing records of landline customers for the next ninety days. The FBI presented this FISA authorization to the NSA, which acts as a service organization for the FBI and the CIA in collecting com- munications data. The NSA, with the FISA warrant in hand, then obtained the Verizon billing records.
© Snowden also provided the Post and The Guardian with another © secret document: a PowerPoint presentation on twenty slides, sent by the NSA to other intelligence agencies. It described a program it was using for monitoring the Internet. Its code name was the aforementioned PRISM. It was authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was designed to collect messages sent over the Internet from foreigners. Such information was in fact obtained with the knowledge of the service providers. It also required a written directive from both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence and a review by the Department of Justice every three months for each and every case. After obtain- ing this data, the NSA ran programs, as required by law, to filter out all domestic Internet communications, but, as Snowden pointed out, domestic information was also accidently picked up. Whenever the Justice Department actually opened an investigation against Ameri- cans in contact with foreign suspects, as it did in 170 cases in 2013, it could obtain warrants from the FISA court to search these Ameri- cans’ Internet activities.
These two documents raised legitimate questions for many
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