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The Great Divide | 123 act, Section 215, euphemistically referred to as the “library records” provision, permitted the FISA court to issue warrants authorizing searches of records by the NSA and other federal agencies to inves- tigate international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities. Through these FISA authorizations, the NSA could obtain “tangible things” such as “books, records, papers, documents, and other items.” Under the interpretation of this section of the law by both the Bush and the Obama administrations, the FISA court was enabled by Congress to issue warrants to telephone companies demanding that they turn over to the NSA the bulk billing records of all calls made in America. The FISA court need only deem these records to be “rel- evant” to the FBI’s investigations of terrorists and spies. Essentially, the NSA, to create a searchable database of telephone billing records, used the FISA court’s controversial interpretation of the word “relevant” in Section 215. Such a “haystack,” as the NSA called the national collection of billing records, could allow the FBI to instantly find missing “needles,” as this tracking was supposed to work, even if the connections were made years earlier. For example, ) if the FBI had a lead on a foreign suspect, it could search the data- ® base for any telephone calls made by the foreign suspect to tele- phone numbers in America and then who those people called. The FBI always had this power, if it obtained a warrant, but it did not previously have the “haystack” of records in a single database. Gen- eral Keith Alexander, who headed the NSA between 2005 and 2014, believed that maintaining such a haystack database made sense. “His approach was, ‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’” according to one former senior U.S. intelligence official quoted by The Washington Post. According to critics of NSA domestic surveillance, including the ACLU, the results provided by this vast database did not justify its immense potential for abuse. In early May 2015, just three weeks before this part of the Patriot Act was set to expire, a three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with the ACLU position, overturning a lower court deci- sion that said it was legal. The panel found that the word “relevant” in the act was not intended by Congress to justify the acquisition and storing of the bulk records of telephone companies for possible | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 123 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019611