Surveillance reform explainer: can the FBI still listen to my phone calls? - Guardian

Lone wolves, roving wiretaps, business records – all these technical terms cloud the real question on everyone’s minds: is the phone chatter of ordinary Americans now immune from government surveillance?

Something surprising happened in Washington DC on Tuesday: Congress passed surveillance reform. Last weekend, three parts of the Patriot Act – a bill disapproved of in its current form by many Americans across party lines – expired, ending authority for several forms of surveillance of US citizens introduced by the Bush administration, backed by Barack Obama, and altered in secret by the National Security Agency (something Edward Snowden later exposed).

The Senate on Tuesday passed the USA Freedom Act, which restores expired powers of the FBI, notably the “business records”, “lone wolf” and “roving wiretap” provisions, but puts an end to the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of American phone records. The fight was hard-won: Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell advanced three different amendments that would have defanged the reforms in various ways. All three failed.

So that’s it – the FBI can’t listen to my phone calls anymore, right?

Wrong. The FBI will do whatever it wants with your phone calls, provided it has a warrant. Section 215 of the Patriot Act, used by the FBI “to obtain large collections of metadata”, had indeed expired, but the USA Freedom Act restored it. (The Freedom Act, as mentioned, will stop the NSA from collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk. More on that in a second.)

The main statute the FBI uses to listen in directly on phone calls is called Calea – the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Calea was designed to make it easier for the FBI to listen in on calls as telecoms technology shifted from copper wires to digital. Essentially, giving the FBI a backdoor key to your network is a condition of running a phone or internet company. Where phone records are concerned, the FBI has a history of circumventing the requirement for a warrant, notoriously in the years after 9/11 with “exigent letters” seeking billing records, which claimed – often falsely – that the situation was an emergency and a grand jury was about to be convened.

And there are National Security Letters, which allow the FBI to collect “business records” (and that includes credit card statements and phone information) without having to get permission from a judge.

National Security Letters are sticking around, though they can’t be used to collect phone records in bulk anymore. But the Freedom Act specifically states that you won’t be able to tell anybody you received a National Security Letter. If this provision sounds to you like it does not belong in something called the Freedom Act, you have a point. - Read More at the Guardian

Surveillance reform explainer: can the FBI still listen to my phone calls? - More