Megan mentioned this in the Morning News, but this story deserves its own post—over at the Guardian, Glenn Greenwald reports that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has granted the FBI and the NSA the power to suck up all Verizon’s call records, regardless of relevance to any kind of investigation or threat. They call it “metadata.”

Though the specific order leaked to the Guardian was for a three-month period and specifies Verizon, it’s safe to assume this is not an isolated incident. Here is the original text of the order.

The story also explains the vague but Cassandra-like warnings from senators Wyden and Udall of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities.

For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be “stunned” to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted.

Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized.

Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: “We’ve certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of ‘relevance’ to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion.” The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that.

Those senators have been warning the public about “twisting” of the Patriot Act and abuse of surveillance powers—in ways that even most senators don’t understand—for years now, further indicating that this three-month FISC order is a small part of a larger pattern. From a 2011 NYT story:

During the debate, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that the executive branch had come up with a secret legal theory about what it could collect under a provision of the Patriot Act that did not seem to dovetail with a plain reading of the text. “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Mr. Wyden said… The Obama administration declined to explain what the senators were talking about.

Over on Twitter, Greenwald is being slightly more pugnacious:

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....