*In September last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled UK’s mass surveillance activities (which were revealed by Snowden) unlawful. Congress reauthorised that law (up to 2023) without major changes in 2018

It’s controversial because when foreign targets communicate with Americans, the government collects those Americans’ emails and other private messages without a warrant, too. *NSA’s warrantless surveillance programme is now conducted under a law called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act.

But before NSA gets the copies, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has to agree that there is “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that the seed target is linked to terrorism *Under the new system, bulk records stay with the phone companies but the NSA can get copies of all records of a target and everyone with whom a target has been in contact. *Changes made by Congress in a 2015 law, the USA Freedom Act, overhauled how the NSA can gain access to domestic telecom data UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency was engaging in ‘population-scale’ interception of communications Operational programmes: Tempora, a bulk data store of all internet traffic Karma Police, ‘a web browsing profile for every visible user on the internet’ and Black Hole, a database containing more than a trillion events including internet histories, email and instant messenger records, search engine queries and social media activity. Number of records of phone calls and text messages NSA vacuumed up from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon in 2017 - more than three times what it collected in the previous year * Intelligence analysts also search for metadata - who contacted whom and when NSA’s warrantless surveillance programme (which originated after 9/11 and has been extended thrice) covers noncitizens abroad whose communications are collected from American companies like Google * Post-9/11, the NSA had been collecting Americans’ domestic phone logs in bulk - billions of records per day.

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