Snowden leaks expose NSA mass surveillance under Section 702

NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed to The Guardian and Washington Post on June 5, 2013, that the NSA collected bulk phone metadata on all Americans and used Section 702 to run PRISM — a program that extracted internet communications from nine major tech companies. The leaks proved the government was using Section 702 to conduct "backdoor searches" querying the incidentally collected data of Americans without a warrant. The revelations triggered congressional reform efforts that stalled for a decade.