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

[ConservativeDemocrat]

204. Your RIGHT to privacy only extends to those things you keep private

This is called the "third-party doctrine" and it is long-established Supreme Court precedent. If you give something to someone else, you don't have a Constitutional right to enjoin them from sharing it with others. You may specify it in contracts, and legislative bodies can enact various statutes to do so. But even then, that doesn't affect court subpoenas in the least. And the legislatures (specifically Congress), has explicitly given the NSA not only the authority to do this, but are also explicitly paying them to do it. So you're blaming the wrong people anyway.

As for the practical effects of searching for phone records, to go back in history would require the various service providers to keep all that information. They may, as a business, decide that is too expensive, which would cause all that data to be lost. So instead the NSA does it for them. Largely speaking, the thing the screamers are screaming about is nothing more than a secret "Internet Wayback Machine" for cellphone and email metadata, among other things (I strongly suspect they are also saving all the US Mail's records of packages delivered as well.)

Insofar as why one should trust the NSA more than private companies, as I've already stated, the NSA (unlike private companies) get no additional money if they sell your private information, which they do - constantly. In fact, it is a felony for the NSA to even release it to the public, as Snowden did. And any contractors they hire are similarly covered by the same laws.

In terms of saying that the "NSA missed the Boston Bombers", the Boston Bombers were interviewed by the FBI a year before they did their bombings, and they came to the conclusion that these were just regular kids going through typical teenaged angst. Besides, the NSA's job is pure signal intelligence, not to make judgement calls. You're thinking of the FBI (for domestic) and CIA (for foreign). And those very procedures you decry are inadequate are almost certainly why the NSA doesn't catch foreign drug dealers - more to the point, they likely know all about them, but have no ability to extradite them from Columbia. And that's not their job anyway.

Again, you keep asserting that the NSA is "violating the Constitution", but there is little sign that they're doing anything different than what has been ruled Constitutional in the past. So if you're all so terribly concerned that the NSA could potentially dig up that you like to watch porn (not exactly an uncommon thing among men, and something they're not interested in), instead of entering porn words on Google's servers (which you don't own), go out somewhere, buy old-fashioned nudy magazines off the street corner of some big city, and pay cash.