24 public only learned that the phone company was turning over its billing records on June 5, 2013, when Snowden disclosed it to the Guardian and Washington Post. The documents he provided the journalists showed that the NSA had been obtaining phone records every three months that had been collected by Verizon. While this revelation may have shocked the American public, the NSA had not acted on its own. It had obtained a warrant issued by a secret court established by Congress in 1978 as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for each request for records. Congress empowered the FISA court to hear cases and authorize search warrants in secret in cases involving national security. As its name implies, the FISA court was meant to deal with matters bearing on foreign intelligence activities in the United States. That restriction changed after the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. A month after the attack, Congress expanded the purview of the FISA court by passing the USA Patriot Act (an acronym which stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism”). Part of the Act, Section 215, euphemistically referred to as the "library records" provision, permitted the FISA court to issue warrants authorizing searches of records by the NSA and other federal agencies to investigate international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities Through these FISA authorizations, the NSA could obtain "tangible things" such as "books, records, papers, documents, and other items." Under the interpretation of this section of the law by both the Bush and Obama administrations, the FISA court was enabled by Congress to issue warrants to telephone companies demanding that they turn over to the NSA the bulk billing records of all calls made in America.. The FISA court need only deem these records to be “relevant: to the FBI’s investigations of terrorists and spies. Essentially, this