This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision in which it found the NSA’s “bulk telephone metadata collection program” to be exceeding its statutory authority under the Patriot Act, and asked Congress to step in and explicitly authorize the program or do something else entirely. It’s important to know what the NSA’s telephone metadata program doesn’t do: it doesn’t affect cell phones, used by most Americans, and it doesn’t record the content of any calls made by land-line.  The “spying,” to use the term embraced by the media since the revelation by former NSA employee Edward Snowden of the program, is confined to the calls’ times, dates, length, and phone numbers, which are assembled into a central NSA searchable database.  The program was designed to thwart terrorists plotting against the United States by finding calling patterns symptomatic of such plotting. The ACLU,...(Read Full Post)