BREAKING: Federal judge rules NSA data gathering on all US telephone calls is unconstitutional

[JDPriestly]

196. As I explained, when it comes to your constitutional rights, the chilling of your rights, of your

speech is enough to constitute damage. On edit, I have to add that the Constitution guarantees your innate RIGHT to privacy in your papers, etc. When your RIGHT to privacy is violated, you have been damaged. That is the damage. Damages do not have to be loss of physical property or money or life. You have guaranteed rights in the Constitution. You suffer damage if you are deprived of those rights.

On further edit, I wonder if you are really concerned about whether there are damages in the sense of whether there is a remedy. Yes. There is a remedy. The NSA can be ordered to stop violating our fundamental rights under the Bill of Rights. That will be our remedy. If there is a remedy, there were damages. The remedy grows out of the damages.

As for this portion of your response:

"They're pulling in yottabytes of unsearched data (and I know it's unsearched because of its size, not to mention the legal impediments and oversight) into a giant data warehouse, so that when the FBI calls up and says "We have a subpoena to find who called [phone] in the last 6 months", the NSA can then run a batch job to find out that information and give it to them."

The NSA does not need to have the data in order for the FBI to get that information. We entrust our information to our service provider. The FBI can subpoena it from the service provider with no need to go through the NSA.

The NSA and FBI are both government agencies. It is much safer to have a government agency subpoenaing documents or even formally requesting documents from a private company than to have them subpoenaing documents or requesting them from their close relations in the NSA.

And by the way, if you don't trust private companies to take care of your information, then why would you trust the NSA? The NSA is contracting this work out to private companies.

To me, that gives rise to the stink of corruption. The NSA gives lucrative contracts to private companies to do work that duplicates to a great extent what other law enforcement and private companies do. Who knows what kinds of favors or illegal activities are hidden in that kind of incestuous relationship.

As for the speculative aspect of the damages due to the spying and violations of personal privacy, is there anything more speculative than the NSA's apparent or at least stated claim that it needs to obtain all the metadata in order to get the data relevant to its search for terrorists? Hidden within that claim is the speculation that anyone within reach of the NSA's dragnet for records could be a terrorist or assist in locating terrorists.

We have only to observe that the NSA missed the Boston Bombers and has also missed numerous drug dealers, mass killers, etc. to realize that the NSA's speculation is pure bureaucratic CYA mumbo-jumbo. Face it, the NSA is violating the Constitution and our personal rights to privacy so that in the future it will be able to vindicate itself by claiming that it "did all it could."

No, the NSA is wasting precious tax money on collecting records it does not need when that money is needed to investigate real crimes.