> I am sure you meant well but I found your write-up somewhat scattered and lacking a logical conclusion supported by prior points. This is easy to do if one is writing with passion. I've done it too.

IANAL! But my 'point' is that there is a process
of bringing cases, claims of unconstitutionality, to the
SCOTUS and now that process has started. There
will be the issue of a plaintiff having 'standing'
to bring the case, but maybe now 120 million
Verizon customers have such standing;
if not, likely still Google does. At this point,
someone's gotta have enough standing.

Then
the 'conclusion' is that in 1-2 years we will
find out what the SCOTUS wants to do about
what appear to be laws enabling serious violations
of at least the Fourth Amendment.

To respond
to much of the discussion in this thread, I
made a side point that it is the job of the SCOTUS
to defend the Constitution and not to
permit bending the Constitution so that
the Executive branch can find it easier to
go after bad guys. So, in particular, a lot
of the discussion here about just how
we will get the bad guys will mostly
just be set aside during this process
and mostly the SCOTUS will not be
much influenced by that consideration.
Sure, maybe some Admin lawyer can
argue something about 'treason'
or "the Constitution is not a suicide
pact", but my guess is that the
main issue will be just a simple,
clear protection of at least the Fourth
Amendment. SCOTUS is interested in defending
the Constitution and not much interested
in how to stop Boston wackos with
pressure cookers.

For a longer term 'conclusion', I pointed out
that if after the SCOTUS decision the
citizens still want NSA listening in on
pillow talk, steamy e-mails,
tracking people to their romantic
meetings, etc., then we can
try to amend the Constitution.

> If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong.

No, in simplest terms the process has started;
likely nothing can stop it; SCOTUS will
make a decision, in all likelihood defending
the Constitution; and then we will see where
we stand.

That this process will move inexorably to
a solid (the other two branches won't argue with it)
conclusion is, in the context of
much of the discussion in this thread,
quite significant: Or, we can discuss
this and that issue and fine point and
what if, but, still, this unstoppable
process will move to its conclusion which
promises to be quite meaningful.

For being "protected", I see no alternative to
the usual from Jefferson

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance".

For Obamacare, I don't know what the legal
status is or what cases have been decided.

For me, my guess is just that Obamacare is
so poorly designed that too soon so many
people will be screaming bloody murder,
especially appropriate in the context,
that Congress will just repeal it.

I don't think that Obamacare was ever
a serious attempt to help the US healthcare
system but just some political posturing
-- Nancy had a really good time,
a lot of fun. She had the smile of
a Homecoming Queen. Now that she's
had her good time, we can go back to
reality.

Obama?
He knows nothing about Obamacare: How do we know?
Because during his efforts at helping it
pass, too soon he said things that were
really dumb, got slapped down hard, and then
just shut up. In particular, at one point
the US College of Surgeons put out
that what Obama said was "uninformed,
misinformed, just plain wrong, and dangerous".
And that caused Obama to shut up.
One more point was, one of his tear jerk
cases said that due to her existing
bad health she couldn't get insurance.
Nonsense: All she had to do was move to
a state with 'community rating', e.g.,
as I've been told, NYS. Obama's interest
in Obamacare was about political posturing,
not healthcare. Also someone from Arkansas,
maybe Bill Clinton, said
that Arkansas had a program for
people like her.

If the IRS comes after many people,
Obamacare will go down in flames.

But for SCOTUS and Obamacare, that case
is less clearly about the Constitution
than the attack on the
Fourth Amendment by grabbing all that
Verizon data.