# The US government secretly runs mass surveillance on ordinary citizens **Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by leaked and declassified NSA documents in 2013, admitted by the government, ruled unlawful by a federal appeals court, and ended by Congress in 2015. Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Post-9/11 era · First circulated: 2013 · Believed by: Majority of Americans say they are concerned about government data collection URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/nsa-surveillance ## Summary For years, warnings about a secret US government dragnet on ordinary citizens' communications were dismissed as paranoia. In June 2013, leaked and subsequently declassified NSA documents showed the claim was real: the government had been collecting Americans' phone records in bulk and tapping into major internet platforms: programs it later confirmed, a federal court found partly unlawful, and Congress moved to rein in. ## The claim That the US government, through the National Security Agency, secretly and systematically collects the communications records and content of ordinary American citizens who are not suspected of any crime, rather than only monitoring specific, individualized foreign-intelligence targets. ## Origin and timeline - 2001: Congress passes the USA PATRIOT Act weeks after the September 11 attacks, including Section 215, which lets the FBI seek a FISA court order for 'business records' relevant to a terrorism investigation. - 2008: Congress enacts Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, authorizing surveillance targeting non-US persons believed to be located abroad, without an individual warrant for each target. - 5–6 Jun 2013: The Guardian and The Washington Post, drawing on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, report that the NSA is collecting Verizon customers' phone records in bulk and operating a program called PRISM to obtain data from major internet companies. - Jun–Sep 2013: The Director of National Intelligence confirms the programs' existence and, under White House direction, declassifies the FISA court order and supporting legal opinions. - 2014: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent federal oversight body, publishes detailed public reports on both the Section 215 and Section 702 programs. - 7 May 2015: The Second Circuit Court of Appeals rules in ACLU v. Clapper that the bulk telephone metadata program was not authorized by Section 215 as written. - 2 Jun 2015: Congress passes the USA FREEDOM Act, ending bulk collection under Section 215 and replacing it with a narrower, court-ordered, provider-held records system. ## The evidence, claim by claim - Claim: The NSA collected the phone records of ordinary Americans in bulk, not just suspects. Evidence: Confirmed. The declassified FISA court order to Verizon Business Services, dated April 25, 2013, directed the company to hand over call detail records 'on an ongoing daily basis' for all calls between the US and abroad and wholly within the US, not a targeted list of suspects. - Claim: The NSA had a program to pull data directly from major internet and tech companies. Evidence: Confirmed. The government has acknowledged the PRISM program under Section 702, in which the NSA compels US-based providers to disclose communications associated with specific, but not individually warranted, foreign-intelligence 'selectors' such as an email address. - Claim: The programs swept in Americans' communications, not just foreigners'. Evidence: Confirmed with an important caveat. Section 702 targets only non-US persons believed to be abroad, but the PCLOB and other oversight bodies confirmed that Americans' communications are collected 'incidentally' when they communicate with a foreign target, and can later be searched using US-person identifiers, a practice since restricted but not eliminated. - Claim: The bulk phone-records program was illegal. Evidence: Confirmed by a federal appeals court. In ACLU v. Clapper (2d Cir. 2015), the Second Circuit held that the government's sweeping interpretation of Section 215 was not supported by the statute's text, calling the scale of collection 'unprecedented and unwarranted.' - Claim: Officials misled the public and Congress about the programs' scope. Evidence: Substantially confirmed. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Senate in March 2013 that the NSA did not 'wittingly' collect data on millions of Americans; after the leaks, he acknowledged the answer was inaccurate and apologized, calling it the 'least untruthful' answer he could give in an open hearing about a classified program. ## Why people believe it - Because it is true, and documented as such, which is precisely why it functions as Exhibit A for surveillance claims that have no comparable evidence. - The programs were classified by design, so the public had no way to confirm or refute the claim until an insider disclosure and subsequent declassification made the paper trail public. - The scale and legal nuance (metadata versus content, foreign targeting versus incidental collection) are easy to flatten into a simpler, scarier story than the sourced one, in both directions. ## Open questions - How much of the broader collection apparatus Snowden exposed remains unknown. The government has estimated he removed as many as 1.7 million documents, a figure the journalists who received the archive have called imprecise; only a small, editorially vetted fraction was ever published, and some later-disclosed programs, including MUSCULAR, were never confirmed by officials with the same directness as PRISM or the Section 215 order. Whether meaningful capabilities remain undisclosed a decade on isn't something an outside observer can settle either way. - Whether the 2015 reforms ended bulk collection or simply relocated it. The USA FREEDOM Act closed the specific Section 215 telephone-metadata program the Second Circuit found unlawful, but it left Section 702 and Executive Order 12333 (the broader authorities under which programs like PRISM and MUSCULAR operated) largely intact, and Congress has reauthorized Section 702 more than once since, most recently in 2024. Whether Americans' data reachable through those other authorities has shrunk to match, or simply absorbed whatever the Section 215 program used to do, is genuinely disputed among researchers and wasn't resolved by the 2015 law. - How often Americans' communications, swept in as an acknowledged incidental byproduct of Section 702 targeting, are later searched using their own names or identifiers, a practice critics call a 'backdoor search.' The FISA Court itself found compliance problems 'persistent and widespread' as recently as 2022, and a 2024 proposal to require a warrant for these searches failed in the House by a single vote in favor of a lighter reporting-and-approval regime instead. Whether that narrower fix meaningfully limits searches of Americans' communications, or mostly documents a practice that continues much as before, remains contested. - Whether the FISA Court's oversight of these programs is a meaningful check or a formality. The 2015 reforms added a panel of outside amici the court may consult on novel legal questions, but appointing one is left entirely to the presiding judge's discretion, and unlike the government, amici cannot appeal an adverse ruling. How much that changed the court's practical rate of approving surveillance applications, compared with its record before 2013, remains an open question among the legal scholars who study its still-largely-secret docket. ## Sources - Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (2014): https://documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents/OversightReport/ec542143-1079-424a-84b3-acc354698560/215-Report_on_the_Telephone_Records_Program.pdf - Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (2014): https://documents.pclob.gov/prod/Documents/OversightReport/823399ae-92ea-447a-ab60-0da28b555437/702-Report-2.pdf - American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, No. 14-42-cv (2d Cir. May 7, 2015), opinion, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2015): https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/legal-documents/clapper-ca2-opinion.pdf - USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, Public Law 114-23, United States Congress (2015): https://www.congress.gov/114/plaws/publ23/PLAW-114publ23.pdf - Statement from DNI Clapper on Ending the Section 215 Bulk Telephony Metadata Program, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (IC on the Record) (2015): https://www.intelligence.gov/ic-on-the-record-database/results/792-statement-from-dni-clapper-on-ending-the-section-215-bulk-telephony-metadata-program - NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily, The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald (2013): https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order - U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, The Washington Post, Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras (2013): https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html - NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say, The Washington Post, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani (2013): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. 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