[mpyne]

I'm more surprised at a couple of things:

a) The stated justification for why it must be secret from defense attorneys. This isn't "sources and methods" of intelligence, this is tapping cell phones, hardly something no one thought the cops can do. And more to the point, what are crooks going to do, switch to landlines?

b) The Federal LE agency involved in grabbing the records set aside for ACLU. The U.S. Marshals are, if I understand right, the law enforcement arm of the Federal courts themselves, so were they enforcing a Federal magistrate's order when they seized the records?

c) The reasoning they use to say the search is reasonable; I know the law and technology have not mixed well with digital comms, but it would seem to me that if you have to MITM or otherwise actively communicate with and interfere in the operation of a person's cell phone, that you've performed a search, even if you only end up grabbing metadata. And the Smith v. Maryland exception used for NSA wouldn't seem to apply here either, as LE is going out to grab the same metadata themselves instead of obtaining a private entity's similar records.