Woke up this morning to find out the Government has my phone records...

[leveymg]

84. Revisions to "minimization" (storage) rules allow NSA to hold onto your data essentially forever.

NSA call database
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The United States' National Security Agency (NSA) maintains a database containing hundreds of billions of records of telephone calls made by U.S. citizens from the four largest telephone carriers in the United States: AT&T, SBC, BellSouth (all three now called AT&T), and Verizon.[1]

The existence of this database and the NSA program that compiled it was unknown to the general public until USA Today broke the story on May 10, 2006.[1] It is estimated that the database contains over 1.9 trillion call-detail records.[2] According to Bloomberg News, the effort began approximately seven months before the September 11, 2001 attacks.[3]

The records include detailed call information (caller, receiver, date/time of call, length of call, etc.) for use in traffic analysis and social network analysis, but do not include audio information or transcripts of the content of the phone calls.

The database's existence has prompted fierce objections. It is often viewed as an illegal warrantless search and a violation of the pen register provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and (in some cases) the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The George W. Bush administration neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the domestic call record database. This contrasts with a related NSA controversy concerning warrantless surveillance of selected telephone calls; in that case they did confirm the existence of the program of debated legality. The program's code name is Stellar wind.[4]

http://www.cato.org/blog/nsa-surveillance-violated-constitution-secret-fisa-court-found
It’s cause for concern any time government exceeds the bounds of the Fourth Amendment, but it should be truly worrying when it’s in the context of mass-scale spying by the NSA. Based on what little we know of the NSA’s programs from public reports, a single “authorization” will routinely cover hundreds or thousands of phone numbers and e-mail addresses. That means that even if there’s only “one occasion” on which the NSA “circumvented the spirit of the law” or flouted the Fourth Amendment, the rights of thousands of Americans could easily have been violated.

Moving from confirmed fact to mild—but I think reasonable—speculation, there is something about the peculiar phrasing of these statements worth noticing: “collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures.” Minimization procedures are the rules designed to limit the retention and dissemination of irrelevant information about innocent Americans that might get picked up during authorized surveillance. In ordinary criminal wiretaps, it makes sense to talk about “collection carried out pursuant to… minimization procedures” because, under the stricter rules governing such spying, someone is supposed to be monitoring the wiretap in realtime, and ensuring that innocent conversations (like a mobster’s spouse or teenage kids chatting on the house line) are not recorded.

But that’s not how FISA surveillance normally works. As a rare public ruling by the FISA Court explains, the standard procedure for FISA surveillance is that “large amounts of information are collected by automatic recording to be minimized after the fact.” The court elaborated: “Virtually all information seized, whether by electronic surveillance or physical search, is minimized hours, days, or weeks after collection.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, minimization is something that normally happens after collection: First you intercept, then you toss out the irrelevant stuff. Intelligence officials have suggested the same in recent testimony before Congress: Communications aren’t “minimized” until they’re reviewed by human analysts—and given the incredible volume of NSA collection, it’s unlikely that more than a small fraction of what’s intercepted ever is seen by human eyes. Yet in the statements above, we have two intriguing implications: First, that “collection” and “minimization” are in some sense happening contemporaneously (otherwise how could “collection” be “pursuant to” minimization rules?) and second, that these procedures are somehow fairly intimately connected to the question of “reasonableness” under the Fourth Amendment.