Obama signs the USA FREEDOM Act, ending the NSA's bulk phone metadata program

President Obama signed the USA FREEDOM Act on June 2, 2015, the first legislative rollback of NSA surveillance authorities since the Church Committee era, ending the bulk collection of Americans' phone metadata under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. The law required the NSA to instead request specific call detail records from telecoms using a court-approved process with a particular selection term rather than vacuuming up all records. The NSA formally ended bulk collection on November 29, 2015. The law left Section 702 collection — the PRISM program — intact and did not impose a warrant requirement for querying Americans' communications incidentally collected under that authority.