Foreign-intelligence surveillance orders, by administration
Applications for foreign-intelligence surveillance approved by the FISA Court, by administration, a rough gauge of the surveillance state's scale. Order volume roughly doubled after 9/11 and stayed high through Obama's terms, then fell sharply after 2018. These are court-approved orders, not warrantless actions; the era's two genuinely warrantless bulk-collection programs, both Bush/Obama-era, are noted below the chart. But read the falling recent bars with care: as the rest of this page shows, the fastest-growing federal surveillance now runs on commercial data and AI that never reach a court at all.
The warrantless programs are separate, and both were Bush/Obama-era. Not counted in the bars above: Stellar Wind, the warrantless wiretapping program run outside the FISA Court (2001–2007, Bush); and Section 215 bulk telephone-metadata collection of hundreds of millions of Americans' call records (2006–2015, started under Bush, run through most of Obama's terms; a federal appeals court ruled it exceeded the statute in 2015, and the USA FREEDOM Act ended it). Both predate Trump I. By contrast, Section 702 collection has grown across every administration since 2008 (89,000 targets in 2013 → ~269,000 in 2023), a metric on which recent administrations, not Bush/Obama, are the standouts.
On precision: FISA applications are court-approved orders, not warrantless surveillance. The bars are representative annual figures anchored to specific reported years (Clinton ~1,000 in 2000; Bush ~2,200 around the 2006–07 peak; Obama ~1,800 in 2012 and 2016; Trump I ~1,350 in 2017, falling sharply after 2018; Biden 358 in 2022 and 352 in 2024; Trump II 287 in 2025, when four applications were denied in full after none in 2024), read them as the shape of the trend, not exact per-year counts. Trump II is a partial term; its 2025 figure includes §702 certifications, which the 2024 count excluded.
Palantir's reported government revenue, by fiscal year, from its SEC filings. As court-ordered surveillance fell, the business of fusing government data grew.
This segment mixes U.S. federal and allied-government revenue, and is reported revenue, not federal contract obligations; the shape, a step-change in 2025, is the point.
The surveillance that skips the court
A FISA order is a request to a judge. The fastest-growing forms of federal surveillance never involve one. Three channels, all expanded in 2025, sit entirely outside the chart at the top of this page:
Data bought, not warranted. Agencies from ICE to the FBI to the IRS purchase Americans' location and personal records from commercial data brokers, sidestepping the warrant the Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter decision would otherwise require, on the theory that data offered for sale is “public.” A 2023 intelligence-community report conceded the government holds a “significant amount” of such data and cannot fully say how much. A bill to close this “data-broker loophole” passed the House in 2024 and died in the Senate.
Data fused across agencies. A March 2025 executive order directed agencies to tear down the walls between their records and give designated officials access to data across the government. The administration turned to Palantir, the analytics firm co-founded and chaired by Peter Thiel, whose software is now deployed at DHS, the IRS, HHS, and other agencies, and whose ICE platform “ImmigrationOS” fuses tax, Social Security, and license-plate data for near-real-time tracking.
Speech scanned by AI. A 2025 State Department effort, “Catch and Revoke,” uses AI to scan the social media of visa holders, especially students, to justify revoking their status; mandatory social-media vetting was extended to millions of applicants.
This is why a falling FISA line is not the same as less surveillance. The court process shrank; the surveillance moved to where no court is involved.
What is built, and what is only feared: keep them separate. Documented: real and growing contracts, the March 2025 data-sharing order, and specific inter-agency data flows (several now in active litigation). Contested: critics warn these pieces add up to a single “master database” on every American: Palantir denies building one and fact-checkers have found no evidence such a merged system exists, so it is best described as a capability being assembled, not a confirmed system. The phrase “pre-crime” is likewise a critics' characterization: the government has begun soliciting predictive-targeting tools (an FBI request for vendors in 2026), but no operational federal program that flags ordinary people for future crimes is documented as of August 2026. And this is not new or one-sided: Palantir was seeded by the CIA's venture arm around 2004 and has held ICE contracts since 2014, under both parties: 2025 is an acceleration in scale and reach, not an invention. Contract “ceilings” announced in 2025 (a $10B Army deal, others) are maximums, not money spent.