The discrepancy between the program and the so-called "relevance" standard under the Patriot Act, the law used to justify the program, led Sensenbrenner, the original author of the act, to propose banning bulk collection.
Judge Pauley took a more sympathetic view of this relevance standard than many lawmakers in Congress, although he acknowledged it was "problematic" that many were not aware of how widely the law was being interpreted before disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Under this relevance standard, the administration has collected the details of every call made by every American, even though the overwhelming majority of these calls have nothing to do with terrorism.
The government may need the haystack to find the needle, but gathering the haystack without knowledge that it contains the needle is precisely what the relevance standard and Section 215 are supposed to prevent.
The other side of the coin is, of course, the increasing relevance of standards like OpenGL, OpenAL, and OpenCL: powerful cross-platform systems for graphics, audio, and parallel processing.
Despite the number of studies in recent years underlining the high relevance of standards in cloud computing, unfortunately this study reveals that most UK organisations still lack a comprehensive understanding on the importance of standards in minimising lock-in risks.
The "new media" are clearly gaining relevance within standard curricula.
This finding emphasizes the relevance of standard reporting guidelines.
Traditional experimental approaches most often have used the single criterion of functional relevance as the standard for candidate gene declaration [ 16].
It thus provides to the systems engineer some guidance as to the relevance of those standards to his or her work.
