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Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the U.S. government to engage in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications, including phone calls, texts, emails, social media messages, and web browsing. The government claims to be pursuing vaguely defined foreign intelligence “targets,” but its targets need not be spies, terrorists, or criminals. They can be virtually any foreigner abroad: journalists, academic researchers, scientists, or businesspeople. And in the course of this surveillance, the government casts a wide net that ensnares the communications of ordinary Americans on a massive scale — in violation of our constitutional rights.

PRISM: The NSA obtains communications — such as international messages, emails, and internet calls — directly from U.S. tech and social media companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The government identifies non-U.S. person accounts it wishes to monitor, and then orders the company to disclose all communications and data to and from those accounts, including communications with U.S. persons.

Upstream: Working with companies like AT&T and Verizon, the NSA intercepts and copies Americans’ international internet communications in bulk as they flow into and out of the United States. The NSA then searches for key terms, such as email addresses or phone numbers, that are associated with its hundreds of thousands of foreign targets. Communications determined to be to and from those targets — as well as those that happen to be bundled with them in transit — are retained in NSA databases for further use and analysis.

Critically, while Section 702 does not allow the NSA to target Americans at the outset, vast quantities of our communications are still searched and amassed in government databases simply because we are in touch with people abroad. And this is the bait-and-switch: Although the law allows surveillance of foreigners abroad for “foreign intelligence” purposes, the FBI routinely exploit this rich source of our information by searching those databases to find and examine the communications of individual Americans for use in domestic investigations.

Although Congress intended Section 702 to be used for counterterrorism purposes, it’s frequently used today to pursue domestic investigations of all kinds. Both the FBI and CIA have access to some of the raw data produced by this surveillance, and they increasingly use that access to examine the private communications of Americans they are investigating — all without a warrant.