Even former NSA chief thinks USA Freedom Act was a pointless change

The former director of the National Security Agency isn’t particularly concerned about the loss of the government’s bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. As Gen. Michael Hayden pointed out, the only change that has happened is that data has moved to being held by phone companies, and the government can get it under a court order.

Gen Hayden said, "If somebody would come up to me and say, 'Look, Hayden, here’s the thing: This Snowden thing is going to be a nightmare for you guys for about two years. And when we get all done with it, what you’re going to be required to do is that little 215 program about American telephony metadata -- and by the way, you can still have access to it, but you got to go to the court and get access to it from the companies, rather than keep it to yourself” -- I go: “And this is it after two years? Cool!'" The NSA and the intelligence community as a whole still have many other technical and legal tools at their disposal, including the little-understood Executive Order 12333, among others. That document, known in government circles as "twelve triple three," gives incredible leeway to intelligence agencies sweeping up vast quantities of Americans' data. That data ranges from e-mail content to Facebook messages, from Skype chats to practically anything that passes over the Internet on an incidental basis. In other words, EO 12333 protects the tangential collection of Americans' data even when Americans aren't specifically targeted -- otherwise it would be forbidden under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.