The Coming Fight Over American Surveillance

Americans are living in an era of unprecedented government surveillance, made possible by seismic changes in both technology and the law. Never have people generated such volumes of personal information—and never has the U.S. government possessed such powerful means to capture, store, and analyze it. At the same time, the 9/11 attacks prompted Congress to relax many of the legal constraints on surveillance.

For the better part of two decades, Americans acquiesced in these developments. In 2013,  Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, disclosed that the NSA was secretly collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk—a revelation that briefly