But now, thanks to Snowden's renegade disclosures, all three branches have decided that the routine federal collection of metadata — records of who calls whom, and when, but not the content of the calls — needs another hard look.
We know about government attempts to install a "backdoor" on Apple products, of Canadian federal police buying metadata from telecoms after it was deemed unconstitutional, and of broad, sweeping "anti-terrorism" legislation in a number of Western countries that seeks to suppress a range of dissident activity and profile, chiefly, Arab Muslims.
The concept of having an online support infrastructure for protocols, trust and security levels, IRB federal certification, and other metadata to support the regulatory process decision-making process emerged in several interviews.
The microformats metadata embedded in Federal cases on law.resource.org gives us enough to work with, and the very complete details in the RECOP material are quite useful when they are carried through in refactored pages (as they are in the Free Law Reporter served by CALI).
"Few think twice about it, even though it is far more intrusive than bulk telephony metadata collection". The federal courts probably would not be reaching the constitutional issues at all but for the disclosures last summer by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
In August Guardian Australia reported that the Australian federal police had accidentally disclosed sensitive metadata about criminal investigations by failing to redact documents provided to the Senate.
The Australian federal police mistakenly published highly sensitive information – including metadata – connected to criminal investigations, in a serious breach of operational security.
Its law prohibited the state from providing support to a federal agency "to collect electronically stored information or metadata of any person if the state has actual knowledge that the request constitutes an illegal or unconstitutional collection".
A federal appellate court recently held that the bulk metadata collection program is not authorized by the Patriot Act.
Federal judges ruled that such massive collection of citizens' metadata without any connection to a particular investigation was patently illegal, essentially vindicating Snowden.
