Why the ruling against NSA’s phone records program could have huge implications

That Sensenbrenner and others lacked sufficient concern or imagination that section 215 would be wordsmithed and construed to support something like bulk collection is fair criticism. If you are a Congresscritter wanting to have your cake and eat it too, you'd write a vague law that steers completely clear of authorizing what you don't like (bulk collection), and then act shocked when it ends up happening. And I don't think that's a big stretch considering the minority of legislation Congress puts an expiration date on, and section 215 is such, expiring next month.

So now the question is whether Congress lacks any stomach for bulk collection and just lets it expire including all of the far less controversial programs (i.e. they're considered legal, even if you may not like the law or the policy). I think at best they renew it as is, and let the full appeals court or SCOTUS look at it. But they might just scrap it and come up with a narrower replacement to reauthorize uncontroversial parts.

These programs have been in place since at least the Clinton years, yet that didn't stop, say, 9/11. Nor did it stop the recent Boston bombers. Cases we do see stopped are often by lone nutters "buying" terror materials from law enforcement agents posing as terrorits. Kudos for catching these guys, but they are completely unsophisticated enemies. The sophisticated ones don't go on AOL chat asking for plastic explosives.

There are probably practical limits with SIGINT domestically. I think the argument that stopping crime is just like detecting a hacker on your network is fairly weak sauce. Our prevention outcomes will probably be the same if we started cutting these programs.

Trying to know everything does not work. Targeted, traditional police investigation works. Money diverted from the latter to the former is wasted and reduces safety.

And the reality is, effectiveness is complete irrelevant: the search is unconstitutional, even if it demonstrably saved lives.

Americans are just too willing to throw their freedoms at the boogie man.

The thing is, security agencies (not just in the USA) have failed, repeatedly, to act on information they did have. Part of if may have been due to inter-agency rivalries, part of it may have been the agencies drowning in data and being unable to draw any useful intelligence from it. But with this in mind, the demand to let them gather more and more data seems unlikely to solve any of these problems, even if one does not care much about privacy.

A few dozen times.

Then there's an attack, and the President gets to lecture us about weakening security. Then everybody hangs their heads and lets the agencies do whatever they want again.

I personally believe our representatives in Congress are terrified of being the one blamed for weakening our security.

This is a good argument for abolishing the NSA. As an institution it has completely lost credibility with any reasonable member of the electorate - it is hopelessly naive to believe what they say.

Perhaps it can be redeemed with a sustained program of vigorous oversight (over-vigorous, really), but failing that it needs to be abolished and replaced by a new organization with a different charter and most of the influential members of the NSA absent from the levers of power. Of course, neither of these things are likely to happen with the electorate in the state it's currently in.

To the contrary, what we have seen so far is that the NSA has structured its activities around well-defined legal principles:

No privacy interest in things crossing the border -> tapping cross-border fiber cables but not purely domestic ones.

No privacy interest in information held by third parties -> sending third-party subpoenas instead of directly tapping companies' networks.

No privacy interest in phone metadata -> collecting phone metadata.

Inapplicability of the 4th amendment to foreign nationals not on U.S. soil -> filtering out purely domestic communications.