Surveillance, Security and Privacy After 9/11

Modern surveillance debates began before 2001. After the Church Committee exposed abuses by intelligence agencies in the mid-1970s, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, creating a special court to approve foreign-intelligence wiretaps.

After the September 11 attacks, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in October 2001, expanding government powers to collect records and conduct surveillance. In 2013 Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency, leaked documents revealing that the agency had been collecting Americans' telephone metadata in bulk. The revelations prompted lawsuits and a national debate.

In 2015 a federal appeals court ruled that the bulk program exceeded what the PATRIOT Act authorized, and Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, ending the NSA's bulk collection of phone records. Supporters of strong surveillance stress preventing terrorism; critics stress Fourth Amendment privacy and the risk of abuse. Debates continue each time surveillance laws come up for renewal.