We're Supposed To Rely On Private Companies To Keep Govt. From Violating The Constitution?
Siobhan Gorman and Brent Kendall write in the WSJ that no telecom company has ever challenged the government's orders to turn over records in the NSA's phone snooping program, according to the (normally secret) FISA court opinion released on Tuesday:

The phone program was developed under a provision of the Patriot Act that allows the NSA, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to collect business records "relevant to an authorized investigation." The NSA determined that nearly all U.S. phone-call records were "relevant" to terrorism investigations because it needed all the calls in order to determine with whom suspects were communicating.

The records, called "metadata," include phone numbers people dialed and where they were calling from. The content of the calls isn't obtained under this program.

...Civil libertarians said the secret court's opinion showed the court is too deferential to the government. "The opinion only confirms the folly of entrusting Americans' privacy rights to a court that meets in secret and hears argument only from the government," said American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer.

The order finds that the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure don't apply to business records, such as phone-call logs. According to a 1979 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Maryland, which has set a precedent for more than 30 years, there is no expectation of privacy with regard to phone records.

The order also explains the legal reasoning that finds virtually all American phone records to be relevant to the NSA's hunt for terrorists. It says these data meet "the standard for relevant" because "it is necessary to obtain the bulk collection of a telephone company's metadata to determine those connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives."

The TSA also claims it's necessarily to violate your civil liberties. How many terrorists have they found? Make a big "O" with your fingers. That's how many.

The notion that this needle in a meta-data haystack has not been shown to work, and the government's word that they are only collecting "meta-data" -- the phone numbers people were calling and called from -- is not reassuring.

As others have pointed out, you can know a lot about whether a person has a drug habit or is having an affair or any number of other bits of information that you can use against them. And even if you don't use the information against them, our right to privacy is a precious right. It is for each of us to control and not for the government to take away from citizens who have not committed crimes.