A 2007 amendment to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known
as FISA, provided new powers to the National Security Agency to monitor international
e-mail and telephone communications where one person is in the United States, and
where the purpose of such interception is to collect foreign intelligence (Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act of 1978; Protect America Act of 2007). In September 2012, the
U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of the FISA Amendments Reauthorization
Act, which, if also passed by the Senate, will extend the provisions of FISA for five more
years, until 2017. NSA’s XKeyscore program, revealed by Edward Snowden, is a form of
“wiretap” that allows NSA analysts to search through vast databases containing not only
e-mail, but online chats, and browsing histories of millions of individuals (Wills, 2013).