For Pete's sake, if that were true, we wouldn't need the Patriot Act and secret FISA rulings to support it. By the way, if you think people's e-mail and phone records are "open, public information," try calling up a service provider and getting it for yourself.
Moreover, metadata is hardly all the NSA is doing. Even the rubber-stamping, Bush-administration packed FISA court has already found the NSA law under which it runs PRISM was being used unconstitutionally as late as 2011. Of course, the government has argued no one can see the ruling, so we don't know how it was violating the Constitution, or what it's done to fix it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/public-first-secret-court-grants-eff-motion-consenting-disclosure
Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret
In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional. Significantly, the surveillance at issue was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.
EFF filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2012, seeking disclosure of the FISC ruling. Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of the opinion, which found that collection activities under FISA Section 702 "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But, at the time, the Senators were not permitted to discuss the details publicly. Section 702 has taken on new importance this week, as it appears to form the basis for the extensive PRISM surveillance program reported recently in the Guardian and the Washington Post.
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