552, enacted by S. 1927), is a controversial amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on August 5, 2007.

[1] It removed the warrant requirement for government surveillance of foreign intelligence targets "reasonably believed" to be outside the United States.

[3] In December 2005, the New York Times published an article[4] that described a surveillance program of warrantless domestic wiretapping ordered by the Bush administration and carried out by the National Security Agency in cooperation with major telecommunications companies since 2002 (a subsequent Bloomberg article[5] suggested that this may have already begun by June 2000).

The Bush administration maintained that the warrant requirements of FISA were implicitly superseded by the subsequent enactment of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists,[6] and that the President's inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign surveillance trumped the FISA statute.

He suggested that the current law was "badly out of date" – despite amendments passed in October 2001 – and did not apply to disposable cell phones and Internet-based communications.

[13] In the bill, the monitoring of data related to Americans communicating with persons (U.S citizens and non-citizens) outside the United States who are the targets of a U.S. government intelligence information gathering efforts was addressed.

[citation needed] No mention of foreign agent status is made in the Protect America Act of 2007.

All that need be required is that the target be related to an official desire for intelligence information gathering for actions on part of persons involved in surveillance to be granted full immunity from U.S. criminal or civil procedures, under Section 105B(l) of the Act.

Whereas it is generally understood that the FISA Amendments of 2008 repealed the Protect America Act, this is not the case for existing directives and authorizations.

Constitutional lawyers and civil liberties experts expressed concerns that this Act authorized massive, wide-ranging information gathering with no oversight.

"[12] In a heavily-redacted opinion released on January 15, 2009, a United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruling was made in favor of the warrantless wiretapping role of the Protect America Act 2007.