[tweet https://twitter.com/cgreensit/statuses/342451643381587970 ] 
 
 The NSA has been collecting the telephone records of Verizon customers, regardless of any suspected wrongdoing, after obtaining a court order in April. The FISA Court gave the FBI a court order to monitor all national and international calls on an “ongoing, daily basis” for three months. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman report: 
 
 The order directs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order”. It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information”, such as “originating and terminating number”, the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information”. The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities. For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be “stunned” to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. … It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders. 
 
 Timothy B. Lee adds: 
 
 “This confirms what we had long suspected,” says Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization that has long accused the government of operating a secret dragnet surveillance program. “We’ve been suing over this since 2006.” The order is based on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to obtain a wide variety of “business records,” including calling records. EFF has long criticized Section 215, which sets a threshold for obtaining records much lower than the “probable cause” standard required to get a search warrant. But Cohn argues that the kind of dragnet surveillance suggested by the Verizon order exceeds even the authority granted by the Patriot Act. “Section 215 is written as if they’re going after individual people based on individual investigations,” she says. In contrast, the order leaked to the Guardian affects “millions and millions of innocent people. There’s no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation.” 
 
 Marc Ambinder weighs in: 
 
 My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that’s necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can’t know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. Unfortunately, we don’t know precisely what the NSA can do because its rules are highly classified. This disclosure will hopefully force the government to clarify the rules it uses to actually analyze the data it collects. 
 
 Amen. But like Ambers, I’m neither shocked nor that outraged. Meta-data is not the content of our phone records. Gregory Ferenstein’s view: 
 
 The revelation dovetails similar exposes on massive government spying projects, including one project to combine federal datasets and look for patterns on anything which could be related to terrorism. 
 
 Late last year, I wrote about a few actual harms that citizens should be worried about from these types of big-data spying programs. Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying. 
 
 Ed Morrissey compares Obama’s data-mining to Bush’s: 
 
 Hypocrisy is an unfortunately ubiquitous condition in politics, but in the case of NSA seizing Verizon’s phone records, it’s particularly widespread. Some of the people expressing outrage for the Obama administration’s efforts at data mining had a different attitude toward it when Bush was in office. Conversely, we’ll see some people defending Obama who considered Bush evil incarnate for the same thing. 
 
 On that front, this kind of meta-data gathering hasn’t outraged me too much under either administration. This kind of technology is one of the US’ only competitive advantages against Jihadists. Yes, its abuses could be terrible. But so could the consequences of its absence. Maybe the record shows my passionate denunciation of this by Bush. I don’t remember it. If someone finds me in a double-standard here, let me know. Pareene zooms out: ||||| In a statement responding to a report published in the Guardian, the American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday condemned the surrender under the Patriot Act of Verizon customer call logs to the National Security Agency. 
 
 From the statement: 
 
 "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents," said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. "It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies." 
 
 The program was put in place under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, a controversial provision that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of "any tangible thing" relevant to a foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. Recipients of Section 215 orders, such as telecommunications companies, are prohibited from disclosing that they gave the government their customers’ records. 
 
 "Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability." ||||| On Wednesday evening, The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald published a top-secret court order telling Verizon to turn over metadata on millions of business customers — length of calls, phone numbers of both parties, phone-specific identification information, and probably proximate call location, but not the content of calls — to the National Security Agency for three months, from April 25 until July 19, on a daily basis. 
 
 This is a big deal, Greenwald says, because it "shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." It appears, Greenwald adds, to be a continuation of the type of data-mining operation secretly authorized by George W. Bush in October 2001, exposed in 2006, to great furor, then made legal by Congress in 2008. 
 
 We don't know much about how the NSA and other spy agencies work, since their rules are classified. But here's what we know — and think we know — about this potential bombshell of a leak: 
 
 The NSA can do this — legally? 
 
 The short answer is: Yes, probably. Section 215 of the 2001 Patriot Act gives the federal government broad authority to demand a number of "tangible things," including phone records, from telecommunications firms, as long as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) agrees they are "relevant" to a national security investigation. 
 
 Civil liberties and privacy groups have been arguing that the federal government is misinterpreting the law. "This confirms what we had long suspected" since at least 2006, Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation tells The Washington Post. "Section 215 is written as if they're going after individual people based on individual investigations.... There's no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation." 
 
 There are a few important caveats here, says Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy. First, the law "says that the 'things' that are collected must be relevant to a national security investigation or threat assessment, but it says nothing about the scope of the things obtained." It would be "surprising — and troubling" — if the Obama administration is counting whole phone-log databases as a "thing," but that's the larger problem: Figuring out what this court order means. "While this is potentially a huge story," Kerr says, "we don't yet have substantial certainty that the facts are what they have been reported to be." 
 
 The Guardian has the FISC order but was unable to get anyone to say anything about its context. I don't think we yet know if this 3-page order is what it appears to be, or if there is some other document that may reveal limitations not clear from the 3-page order. Note that the order is titled "Secondary Order," which presumably means that there is a primary one that it follows; we don't know what that order said. [Volokh Conspiracy] 
 
 The other big question mark, says Marc Ambinder at The Week, is why the FBI sought the information. 
 
 The language [in the law] doesn't rule out such bulk disclosures, but it suggests that the FBI or NSA has to provide the FISC with a good reason for doing so. The court finds that an undefined "application" from the FBI satisfies that Patriot Act provision... [but] we don't know what application the FISC order responds to. [The Week] 
 
 Let's be clear, says Joshua Foust at his blog. "The NSA, despite the broad nature of its warrant request, did nothing illegal, and the supposed illegality of the FISC procedure has not been demonstrated." 
 
 Who's affected by the data culling? 
 
 The court order is aimed at all customers of Verizon Business Network Services. That is "one of the nation's largest telecommunications and internet providers for corporations," say Charlie Savage and Edward Wyatt in The New York Times. "It is not clear whether similar orders have gone to other parts of Verizon, like its residential or cell phone services, or to other telecommunications carriers." 
 
 Previous reporting, says Greenwald in The Guardian, "has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks." Martin Longman at Booman Tribune speculates that the same is true here: "Since this is a leaked court order, I think we can safely assume that all the other phone carriers received a court order, too." 
 
 Who authorized the phone-log haul? 
 
 Roger Vinson, a senior federal judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Before this order was made public, Vinson was perhaps most famous for ruling that the ObamaCare individual mandate to buy insurance is unconstitutional — a decision not upheld by the Supreme Court. 
 
 Funny how things work out: The Tea Party hero who struck down Obamacare also authorized the NSA Verizon warrant. twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/st… — southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 6, 2013 
 
 Under the Patriot Act, such NSA requests can be approved by either a FISA court judge or "a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court." 
 
 Was this a one-off thing? 
 
 We don't know. But an unidentified "expert in this aspect of the law" tells The Washington Post that this order appears to be, as the Post puts it, "a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006." 
 
 The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency. The expert referred to such orders as "rubber stamps" sought by the telephone companies to protect themselves after the disclosure in 2005 that widespread warrantless wiretaps could leave them liable for damages. [Washington Post] 
 
 "My own understanding," says Ambinder at The Week, "is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records." 
 
 It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there. 
 
 In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis. [The Week] 
 
 Why is everyone making such a big deal of this? 
 
 The idea that the government is spying on its own citizens is kind of creepy. It's important to note that this isn't wiretapping, and "this sort of fishing expedition can sometimes be useful to counter-terrorism," says Juan Cole at Informed Comment, "but fishing expeditions into private papers and records are a violation of the U.S. constitution," and a recipe for all sorts of potential political abuses. 
 
 The government should only be allowed to see private information if there is reasonable cause to think something illegal is going on. Going looking into private records to see if patterns emerge that suggest illegality is the action of a totalitarian government, not a democratic one. The USA Patriot Act was a Sovietization of American law and practice and 2001 was year one of the fall of the Republic, when the Fourth Amendment and aspects of the First Amendment were abrogated. [Informed Comment] 
 
 In fairness, "the government can't keep this information forever, nor can they share information on a willy-nilly basis," says Booman Tribune's Longman. "And it's too much information for them to look at without running it through sophisticated computers." 
 
 Those computers aren't looking to see if you're cheating your business partner or fooling around on your husband. But this is concerning nonetheless, because they're using a provision of a law that is supposed to allow the government to snoop on business records in certain defined circumstances to sweep up every electronic communication in the country. [Booman Tribune] 
 
 Who's to blame? 
 
 The Obama administration, for one. On Thursday, a senior administration official confirmed that the government is vacuuming up massive amounts of phone logs, arguing that such data collection is "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States." 
 
 If you're upset about the government possibly knowing who you call and when, you could also blame the FISC judges who sign off on the data sweeps. But if you really want to nail someone, look to your senator or congressman, says Joshua Foust. "All of the opprobrium you should feel at the government's ridiculously broad surveillance powers needs to be directed at CONGRESS, which keeps approving them while voting they stay secret." 
 
 Congress voted to legalize expansive surveillance powers in 2001 (The USA Patriot Act), 2008 (retroactive immunity for warrantless NSA wiretaps in the FISA Amendments Act), and in 2012 (renewing the FISA Amendments Act). Congress declined to force administration transparency/honesty on secret interpretations of the law in 2001 (USA Patriot Act), 2008 (NSA immunity), 2011 (the [Sen. Ron] Wyden amendment to the NDAA, which would have required interpretations not be secret) & 2012 (the similar [Sen. Jeff] Merkley amendment to the NDAA). Those last two actually got voted down, which means Congress voted to enable secret government legal interpretation. [Joshua Foust] 
 
 What's the fix? 
 
 Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) — both on the Senate intelligence committee — have been publicly urging the Obama administration to lay out its interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act for at least a year. "As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows," they wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. "This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn't know what its government thinks the law says." 
 
 Other people, like Juan Cole, want the Patriot Act — or as he calls it, "the most un-American and anti-patriotic piece of legislation since the Alien and Sedition Act" — repealed, or at least greatly scaled back. This data reaping is "astonishing and appalling on many levels," says Andrew Kirell at Mediaite, but it is not surprising in post-9/11 America. 
 
 This latest example of Obama overreach is sure to rankle the feathers of conservatives.... While many of these same conservatives were rah-rah'ing the expansion of the NSA and United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the Bush years, it is a pleasant change to see them finally care about FISA. Welcome aboard. Now it's up to the liberals who rightly lauded Obama's anti-FISA stance in 2008 to swallow their pride as well and take a stand against this administration's overreach, despite what they might see as partisan opportunism coming from the right. 
 
 As the last 13 years have proven, regardless of who is in the White House the security state will continue to expand. And it will take some hypocrisy on both sides to finally end it. [Mediaite] 
 
 This data-mining could be "Orwellian," or it could be narrower than we think, says Ambinder. "Unfortunately, we don't know precisely what the NSA can do because its rules are highly classified." At the very least, "this disclosure will hopefully force the government to clarify the rules it uses to actually analyze the data it collects." ||||| Robert Scoble / Flickr 
 
 Mark this news, America. It is yet another wake-up call. 
 
 "The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April," Glenn Greenwald reports . "The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian , requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries." Just as disturbing is the fact that we don't even know if AT&T and other major telecommunications companies have received similar secret orders.Says the Electronic Frontier Foundation How is this legal? 
 
 The order was sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that regulates domestic surveillance for national security purposes, including "tangible things" like a business's customer records. The provision was expanded by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which Congress enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 
 
 ...it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the "tradeoff" of privacy for convenience "worthwhile," or come to accept this "diminution of privacy" as "inevitable," and perhaps not. 
 
 
 
 I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection. 
 
 There is, in fact, debate about whether it is legal, but explains the government's theory:How is it tolerated by the American people?That's the most pressing question. The civic negligence required to reach this point is the thing that most disappoints me about my fellow citizens, who ought to throw out every last member of Congress complicit in the metastasizing surveillance state. I am serious. Look up your representative. In a letter or phone call, demand they take a stand against this, on penalty of you voting against them in a primary or general.That's how change happens when the president who promised it turns out to have lied.if the federal government has a similar order for AT&T or any other carrier. Or if they're spying on Americans' emails as well. Why? That isn't the sort of thing President Obama thinks he needs to tell us, and Congress persists in giving him that latitude. Americans, who haven't been objecting to any of this in large numbers, aren't even demanding to know whether or not their government is assemblingHas fear of terrorism done this to us?Apathy?Denial?Whatever the cause, the current behavior of the American electorate does not befit a free people.The Supreme Court, the one branch of government not accountable to the people, hasn't been helpful either, though there is a passage from a Sonia Sotomayor concurrence that merits wider attention A change in jurisprudence is years away from happening, if it ever happens. The surveillance state as now constituted could be reined in quickly if only the American people demanded it. Wake up! Senator Mark Udall says that this is the kind of surveillance Americans will find shocking.Is he right? ||||| [embedtweet id="342443594474463232"] 
 
 Conor Friedersdorf is right, but Republicans have mostly already failed this litmus test. Given the opportunity to limit the powers of the NSA during the Obama administration Republicans in the House and Senate voted to reauthorize the NSA's post-9/11 expanded powers. 
 
 Ron Wyden has been crowing about this for some time. Because he is a Democrat criticizing his party from the left, his warnings and complaints have been given only cursory mention in the nonpartisan press, especially compared to the similar, but frequently much more ridiculous criticisms lobbied against the administration by Rand Paul. 
 
 This order went through a FISA Court, according to the rules laid out explicitly by Congress (unlike the Bush administration's abuses, which were only retroactively authorized). The order could've been isolated, or it could've been standard practice. We have no way of knowing. And it's almost definitely not just Verizon. As Marc Ambinder says: "I would assume that these orders are typical and are issued by the FISC to other telephone companies, and possibly to companies that process e-mail as well." (He also says the order is "at odds with statements from government officials who've insisted that the government does not collect all Americans' phone records just because they can.") An unnamed expert cited by the Washington Post says the order "appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006."
– So just how creeped out should we be that the NSA has been collecting phone records about Verizon users? Reaction ranges from shrugs to outrage: Alex Pareene, Salon: It's "equal parts shocking and unsurprising." That the NSA can do this under the Patriot Act is old news, but we have for the first time seen one of the "very top secret" warrants. This could lift the veil of secrecy on how the whole operation works, as civil libertarians have demanded. "But the recent history of the US and domestic surveillance suggests that knowing more won’t lead to doing anything about it." Andrew Sullivan, the Dish: "I’m neither shocked nor that outraged," he writes, because while the NSA got data from the calls, it didn't do any eavesdropping. "Meta-data is not the content of our phone records." Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic: He's appalled that more people aren't outraged that the US "is assembling the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history." And that lack of outrage "does not befit a free people." Al Gore: In his widely circulated tweet, he asks, "Is it me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" (In a similar vein, the ACLU calls it "beyond Orwellian.") Blogger Joshua Foust: The NSA did nothing illegal. "No one will respond to this by voting out their representatives or senators during the next election because, despite the temporary outcry, Americans (including the congressmen and senators who tried to add amendments) don’t care about this very much." The Week has more reaction and analysis. BuzzFeed is having fun with Verizon ads.