Snowden, *by law*, needed to do what he did.

[jeff47]

62. The court did not rule that suspicion was required.

The court ruled there was no expectation of privacy, and that the data was the phone company's, not the subscribers. The court did not rule that suspicion was required. Nor did the court rule that the government can only collect one person's data.

As a result, it's free to collect on anyone and everyone. It's the equivalent of the video tape of a surveillance camera pointed at a public street. Collecting 100M of those tapes is as legal as collecting one. Increasing the scale does not confer privacy protection.

Changing that requires people stop yelling at the NSA, and instead yell at Congress. Because we need a change in the law.

Especially because the phone companies have been selling the metadata to third parties for years. The NSA does not have any special capabilities in processing metadata - it's the kind of thing Google does every day. Those third parties are just as capable of tracking via metadata as the NSA, and stopping only the NSA isn't going to restore privacy.