PANOPTICON mass surveillance in the united states
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On 10 December 2014, Republican U.S. Representative for Michigan's 3rd congressional district member of Congress Justin Amash criticized the act on his Facebook as being "one of the most egregious sections of law I've encountered during my time as a representative" and "It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American".
== USA Freedom Act ==
The USA Freedom Act was signed into law on June 2, 2015, the day after certain provisions of the Patriot Act had expired. It mandated an end to bulk collection of phone call metadata by the NSA within 180 days, but allowed continued mandatory retention of metadata by phone companies with access by the government with case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Later audits and a management decision led to a suspension and cancellation of the Call Detail Records program, with the government oversight bodies determining it had a low yield of unique information.
Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act had previously been used to justify the bulk collection of domestic telephone metadata by the National Security Agency. Two later oversight reviews of the use of this authority examined its operations and its value, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the Section 215 bulk metadata program had "yielded limited unique counterterrorism value" and "often duplicated information more efficiently obtained by targeted investigations.
== Second Trump presidency ==
The second Trump administration has sought state data and consolidated historically isolated federal data. The Justice Department has sought state voter data. The Department of Government Efficiency has collected data seeking access to IRS, Social Security, Selective Service, Medicare, Health and Human Services, Securities and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, and student data. DHS has expanded its surveillance particularly to enable the administration's immigration priorities.
== Modalities, concepts, and methods ==
=== Logging postal mail ===
Under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, the U.S. Postal Service photographs the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces in 2012. The U.S. Postmaster General stated that the system is primarily used for mail sorting, but the images are available for possible use by law enforcement agencies. Created in 2001 following the anthrax attacks that killed five people, it is a sweeping expansion of a 100-year-old program called "mail cover" which targets people suspected of crimes. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency gives to telephone calls, e-mail, and other forms of electronic communication.
Mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. Images captured under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program are retained for a week to 30 days and then destroyed. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. Criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, while the number of requests for national security mail covers has not been made public. Neither the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program nor the mail cover program require prior approval by a judge. For both programs the information gathered is metadata from the outside of the envelope or package for which courts have said there is no expectation of privacy. Opening the mail to view its contents would require a warrant approved by a judge.
=== Wiretapping ===
Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, ECHELON, and NarusInsight to intercept and analyze the immense amount of data that traverses the Internet and telephone system every day.
The Total Information Awareness program, of the Information Awareness Office, was formed in 2002 by the Pentagon and led by former rear admiral John Poindexter. The program designed numerous technologies to be used to perform mass surveillance. Examples include advanced speech-to-text programs (so that phone conversations can be monitored en-masse by a computer, instead of requiring human operators to listen to them), social network analysis software to monitor groups of people and their interactions with each other, and "Human identification at a distance" software which allows computers to identify people on surveillance cameras by their facial features and gait (the way they walk). The program was later renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness", after a negative public reaction.
==== Legal foundations ====
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, requires that all U.S. telecommunications companies modify their equipment to allow easy wiretapping of telephone, VoIP, and broadband Internet traffic.