The act allows the law enforcement agencies to make use of surveillance against organized crime. Before enactment of the Patriotic Act, the courts permitted the law enforcement to carryout surveillance electronically in investigating the ordinary citizens on crimes not related to terrorism, including passport fraud, mail fraud as well as drug related crimes (Doyle, 2001)
The FBI has ordered Apple to create software that will help unlock and retrieve information from iPhone without necessarily knowing what the password is. Apple refused to engage in such activities arguing that it would violet the consumers' privacy (Editorial Board, 2016)
Unfortunately, such records were just that, records. The authorities could not access the content of such communications- as per the Patriot Act of 2001 (The Chicago Tribune, 2015)
The second legislation, "lone wolf" licenses aimless electronic supervision by the FISA court. They did not even need to show the culprit's involvement with terrorism or any foreign authority (Kravets, 2011)