Interesting article parsing laws surrounding the NSA's massive protection program. It is pretty clear that the Supreme Court ruling that was described in the article makes the collection of pen register data constitutional. My understanding from the reports I have seen on this issue is that the NSA program is limited to pen register data. I am not sure why the author then attempted to extrapolate the 1979 Smith vs. Maryland ruling into a means by which email or VOIP calls can be captured? Does the author have some information on the NSA program that I haven?t seen? Or, is he just trying to scare us with a slippery slope analogy? Last week in Toronto 17 terrorists were arrested attempting to acquire three times the explosives used to blow up the Murrow building in Oklahoma. I sure as hell hope we have a database of every call that was made to the cell phones of these conspirators to, and from, the US. It would be too bad if one of the cells they were communicating with used Qwest though; I guess Qwest?s ?principled? stand is more important than having 30,000 or more of our fellow citizens vaporized. But hell, they won?t have to worry about one of those nasty civil suits.

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