In 2013, Edward Snowden, a contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), leaked information to the press about an NSA Project codenamed PRISM, as well as a large number of classified documents

dealing with NSA eavesdropping on foreign government leaders and other matters. Project PRISM paid or otherwise required telecommunications firms to provide the NSA with bulk records of their customers’ telephone and email records. The NSA data mined this information in search of hidden patterns that might indicate that an individual was engaging in terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism.