[ewoodrich]

But what are intangible phone records? Are they "persons, houses, or papers"? Probably not. Maybe they're "effects", but that still would historically suggest physical property.

However, the Supreme Court has clarified these issues in a number of decisions, which is why our law is primarily based on judicial precedent, and not literal interpretation.

That may or not be a good thing, but it's the way our legal system is in fact designed to work.

[tlogan]

Yes - we did have "weird" interpretation of our constitution. Like putting of Japanese Americans in concentration camps (the Supreme Court called it "military necessity"). But eventually public perception changed and the interpretation of our constitution was corrected.

So as first step I want to hear from Supreme Court whether this is constitutional. But NSA says that what they are doing is secret, so ...

[RockyMcNuts]

I think one weird part NSA seems to rely on is... what constitutes a search? Intelligence testimony seems to have implied they thought they could hoover up all this information, and as long as only machines look at it, and when humans do, they have a 51% belief it's a foreign person <wink, wink> and do 'minimization' when it's not <wink, wink>, it's constitutional.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/director-national-inte...

  information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been 
  “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component”

Of course, they also think they can lie to Congress, after being warned in advance about the question, being given a chance to correct it after the testimony, and say they didn't think about this particular activity, and gave the 'least untruthful answer'.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/james-clapper-se...

So I would say we need to have an open debate about exactly what they're doing, and have the Supreme Court, whose job it is, define what those terms mean and what they can do, instead of letting them make it up as they go along, and then lie about it.

[dllthomas]

Bits are "papers" - then the only mechanism for storing information.