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Bae 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 90 days. The FBI presented this FISA authorization to the NSA, which acts as a service organization for the FBI and CIA in collecting communications data. The NSA, with the FISA warrant in hand, then obtained the Verizon billing records. Snowden also provided the Washington Post and Guardian with another secret document, which was actually a power point presentation on 20 slides by the NSA to other intelligence agencies. It described a program it was using for monitoring the Internet. Its code name was 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. Since most of the Internet pipes that carried these messages ran through the United States, the NSA intercepted a large part of the data from Internet companies based in America. This program was not entirely secret from the Internet companies. Such information was in fact obtained with FISA court approval and with the knowledge of the service providers. It also requires 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 of each case. After obtaining this data, the NSA ran programs to filter out all domestic Internet communications. In theory at least, PRISM targeted foreign communications, but, as Snowden pointed out, domestic information was also accidently picked up. Whenever the Justice Department actually opened an investigation against Americans in contact with foreign suspects, as it did in 170 cases in 2013, it could obtain warrants from the FISA court to search these Americans’ Internet activities. So though PRISM supposedly was a tool for foreign surveillance, it could be extended to Americans in contact with foreign suspects. These two documents raised legitimate questions for many Americans, including members of Congress, about the proper role of the FISA court, including should it conduct its business in secret? If Snowden had released only these two documents that related to unwarranted domestic surveillance, and other possible violations of the law by the NSA, it would be difficult for any reasonable person not to see his actions as a valuable and even necessary public service. After all, as the three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would later find, Congress had not intended Section 215 of the Patriot Act to be used to justify the bulk collection of American records. So if he had limited his illegal downloading to the few documents about bulk collection, it would be more difficult to argue that he was not a whistle-blower in spirit if not in the letter of the law and even a hero of the struggle to preserve our civil liberties. But, in fact, he took a great many other secret documents that did not bear on civil liberties issues. As a result, the Snowden case produced a great divide in the American appreciation of him. On one hand, he has been almost universally lauded and lionized by what might be seen as the mainstream media, by numerous academics, and even, as we have seen, by members of Congress. The journalists who assisted him, such as like Greenwald, Poitras and/ Gellman also have been celebrated for the roles they played in bringing Snowden’s revelations to the public. In other circles, the appreciation had been of him has been very different. American and British intelligence HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020177