It seems that I did not recommend this article on MemeStreams. Of the various things that have been written about this Snowden controversy, this is one of the best, for two reasons:

1. It does not take a black and white view of the issue. It clearly explains that, on the one hand, some of the information disclosed likely harms national security without illuminating anything substantive from a civil liberties standpoint, while, on the other hand, some of the information disclosed likely has little impact on national security but does illuminate significant civil liberties issues.

2. It demonstrates that well informed observers of FISA and the NSA were unaware that all call records were being sucked up domestically. Various defenders of this program have argued that everyone knew this was going on and it was all authorized. This article represents a challenge to that assertion.

More importantly, the story, and the leak of the FISA Court order that underlies it, do reflect something significantly new concerning a claimed authority about which the public was not previously informed. Specifically, it reveals that the government was using a particular section of FISA—known as Section 215—as a way of accessing not just specific items about specific persons on a case-by-case basis, but also as a means to create giant datasets of telephony metadata that might later be queried on a case-by-case basis. As we move into the age of Big Data, it may not be surprising that the government would want to have authority to generate such a database; we all recall the Total Information Awareness initiative, after all. But it is surprising to learn both that the government thinks it already has this authority under Section 215, and still more so that the FISA Court agrees and that members of Congress know this as well.