How to reform the NSA’s metadata program

[Commentary] The director of national intelligence announced on July 19 that a court had renewed one of the government’s most controversial surveillance programs — the collection of a vast database of so-called metadata from Americans’ phone calls. The phone metadata effort does not appear to be an obviously unconstitutional abuse of civil liberties. Yet at least two things should bother Americans about it.

• First is that the government is gathering so much phone call information to track what should be a relatively small number of targets. Collecting and keeping the country’s phone records results in a very powerful surveillance tool that, if abused, could give government agents insight into how all sorts of Americans are conducting their lives.
• Second, and related, are the justifications for amassing all of that information. Government lawyers argue that detecting patterns of communications — those whom suspects call and even associates of those associates — has yielded information that has contributed to foiling potential terror plots. In order to produce those benefits, they say, they must have, somewhere, the whole universe of this sort of metadata, which communications firms don’t keep themselves. By that logic, nearly every record anywhere could be considered relevant.