The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court publishes annual statistical reports under the USA FREEDOM Act. Those reports, together with Department of Justice and Office of the Director of National Intelligence transparency figures, form the public baseline for comparing FBI applications that once relied on Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act with later FISA practice.

Section 215 authorized court orders for “any tangible things” relevant to an authorized investigation to obtain foreign intelligence or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, subject to statutory minimization. Before 2013, the government used the provision, among other things, to support a bulk telephony metadata program later described in declassified FISC opinions and in the 2013–2014 reviews by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the President’s Review Group.

Congress amended the statute in 2015. The USA FREEDOM Act ended bulk collection under Section 215 and substituted a call-detail-record program that required a specific selector and FISC approval. Public ODNI reports subsequently showed that the CDR program produced far smaller volumes than the earlier bulk architecture and was discontinued by the government in 2019. Section 215 itself, as reauthorized in 2015, lapsed in March 2020 when Congress did not enact a further extension. The FBI and Justice Department have since told Congress they rely on other authorities, including grand-jury subpoenas, national security letters where available, and remaining FISA titles.

FISC annual reports after 2015 list applications for business records under the amended 215 framework while it remained in force. Those tables, as released, show orders in the low dozens or fewer in several years, not the industrial-scale collection associated with the pre-Snowden metadata program. The same reports continue to enumerate electronic-surveillance and physical-search applications under Title I and Title III of FISA, pen-register and trap-and-trace orders, and, separately, the government’s use of Section 702 of FISA against non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be overseas.

Inspector General audits and FISC opinions unsealed in redacted form have focused public attention on FBI querying of Section 702 repositories, including U.S. person identifiers, rather than on a revived 215 bulk program. The Justice Department’s National Security Division and the FBI have acknowledged compliance incidents in those query practices; the FISC has required remedial reporting. Those findings are distinct from Section 215 application counts.

Congressional Research Service summaries and House and Senate intelligence and judiciary hearing records after 2020 treat Section 215 as expired. Lawmakers have debated whether to restore a reformed business-records authority. The FBI’s public congressional testimony has described investigative gaps in certain national-security cases when 215 was unavailable, while civil-liberties groups have cited the FISC statistics as evidence that the government already obtains similar records through other compulsory process.

Procurement and budget documents do not isolate a large 215-equivalent collection system in current FBI line items. The Intelligence Community’s public budget justifications emphasize FISA Title I, 702, and technical collection programs run primarily by other agencies. Inspector General reports on FBI information systems have addressed query audit logs and minimization, not a classified 215 successor matching the old telephony metadata architecture.

Officials have said in open testimony that national security letters and criminal process remain available for many business records, subject to statutory limits that differ from FISA. The record shows NSL volumes reported annually by the Justice Department; those figures are not interchangeable with FISC-approved 215 orders.

Readers comparing “Section 215 applications” with “the latest FISC annual report” therefore confront a category mismatch if they expect the report to document an ongoing bulk 215 program. The published FISC statistics describe applications the court actually received under live statutory authorities. After the 2015 reforms and the 2020 lapse, those tables show limited 215-style business-records activity and continued, separately counted FISA electronic-surveillance and 702 activity.

Unsealed FISC opinions from the 2000s and early 2010s remain the primary public judicial description of how 215 was once used at scale. Later annual reports are thinner on 215 because the legal predicate changed. No public docket entry identified for this dispatch asserts that the FBI obtained a new bulk 215 order after expiration.

The comparison that the public record supports is therefore institutional and chronological: a high-volume 215 metadata program that FISC opinions later constrained; a narrow post-2015 CDR experiment that the government ended; a statutory lapse in 2020; and FISC annual reports that now primarily tally other FISA tools and residual or historical 215 counts. Claims that current FISC statistics secretly reconstitute the old 215 program are not corroborated by the released tables, the IG products, or the open congressional record.

Further detail would require classified applications the court does not publish. This dispatch is limited to what those public statistical reports, inspector general summaries, and dockets already show.