| ® | Epilogue | 301 issue is not surveillance itself; it is the proper way such surveillance is conducted. The NSA surveillance of telephone records that Snowden exposed was different in its intent from the surveillance of the Cold War. Its target was a selected list of 300 to 400 foreign jihadists living abroad. Many of these individuals residing in Syria, Iraq, and Pakistan had been identified by the FBI and the CIA as active bomb makers, assas- sins, and weapon specialists. This was not domestic surveillance, but when any of these suspects telephoned a phone number in the United States, the NSA checked the billing records of the domestic phone number that had been called to determine all the calls emanating from it. The purpose of this search was to assemble for the FBI a list of contacts that a foreign suspect might have in the United States. To expedite this task, it obtained from telephone companies the billing records, without any names attached, of all their users and stored them in a single archive under its control. While this surveillance targeted foreign terrorists, not domestic dissent, the bulk collection of phone records had the potential for more nefarious use, a danger © that Snowden brought to the public’s attention. As a result, Con- re) gress modified the Patriot Act so that billing records would remain on the computers of the phone companies for a limited time rather than on those of the NSA. The NSA could still search them after obtaining an order from the FISA court, though it could not archive the data for future use, so little harm to individual privacy could be done. Snowden deserves a large share of the credit not only for this change but for making the public aware of domestic surveillance. The bad part of the equation is that Snowden deeply damaged an intelligence system that American presidents have relied on for over six decades. The heart of that system was the sources and methods used to intercept other nations’ communications. Unti