If this happened under George Bush, you would be outraged. Be outraged by Barack Obama too!

[jeff47]

2. IMO it's about data retention.

First, we don't actually know if there's any conversation content going into these data centers. The leaked court order only refers to data like "555-1212 called 555-2121 on June 19th at 6:34pm". The claim that the NSA is pulling content from various communications companies has been around for decades. And these new allegations have been denied by the relevant companies, while these same companies are not denying the phone records order. If they were trying to keep any NSA contact secret, they'd deny both.

So for the moment, I'm operating under the assumption that they are not collecting content - it appears to be the same old claims that have been recycled continuously since the '70s without any new leaks to back them up.

But what good is the phone records without content? You can't find "terrorists" if you don't know what people are saying to each other.

I think it's about data retention. The phone companies keep this data for various amounts of time. Some keep 3 months, some keep 3 years.

If there's another 9/11-scale attack, the government would like to find co-conspirators quickly. Once they have a suspect to start from, they could use the call records to track down people he was in frequent contact with, in an attempt to find those co-conspirators. But if the phone company deletes the records after 3 months, they won't have the data to trace those connections.

But there's an important thing with this theory: they have to have a number to start from. There's no reason to suspect any particular phone number is used by a "bad guy" until he does something "bad".