Excellent Reporting by Mr. Greenwald

If you have not read this alarming piece of journalism by Glenn Greenwald, you really should:

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily - revealed

Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largesttelecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

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.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19...

While the situation is not as awful as it could be --

While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number...

-- the number of doors that the Patriot Act kicked open and the number of actions it legalized in the name of national security is still deeply disturbing:

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance.

In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."

"We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Mr. Pierce does the unpleasant remindy thing which is why he does not get invited into respectable homes:

...

The other thing I hoped would not happen -- but was very confident would happen -- was that the architects of the regime that made this business as usual would step forward now and claimed that their own dingo had eaten their babies.

C'mon down, Jim Sensenbrenner.

"As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation," he said in a statement. "While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. He added: "The Bureau's broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American."

See also: "Fk, Oh For The Love Of," That horse left the barn in 2002. Jim Sensenbrenner's the one who took the hinges off the barn door.

For the record, back in the early days of the Web, the company I worked for was being courted by a Cambridge firm that wanted to build an "internet application" which we could wrap itself around our 30-year-old legacy systems  (and would subsequently be used by our field offices with those newfangled "laptop" computers, which should give you some idea how far back we're going.).  It turned out to be one of the earliest such apps ever built for private industry, and during the courting rituals, the Cambridge firm put on an amazing and slightly terrifying demonstration of the sort of individualized customer profile you could create based on nothing but information available in existing, publicly-accessible databases.) 

I am old enough to be painfully aware that our elected government -- whether well-intentioned or malevolently-inclined or simply corrupt -- can be relied on to virtually always act exactly like my stepkids at bedtime: take things right up to the absolute limit of the house rules...and still not budge until I explicitly tell them its time for bed...and then beg and plead and stall and wheedle for anything more they can get...and then come down a few minutes after that because they somehow forgot to get a drink of water for the 725th night in a row...and then -- Oh noes!  I totally forgot this thing that is due tomorrow!  

and then, a few minutes later, down they come because there might be monsters under the bed.

My stepchildren are also all very gifted junior attorneys who can turn any clear-cut case of violating our house rules into an exhausting game of loophole parsing and past exception citing.  They also show a capacity for generating deflector fields ("Yes, but four months ago ago you forgot to read me a story, so now...") that would awe the crew of the starship Enterprise and which display mnemonic skill completely at odds with their otherwise apparently crippling inability to remember from day to day when it is time to go to bed.

Grownups set prudent limits and enforce them, usually with a lot of haggling that we sometimes later regret.

Children strain mightily against those limits but however much latitude we might grant them on special occasions, they should never be allowed to decide their own bedtime.

Go read the rest here.