I know this is not how the law and precedents work in the USA, but for the sake of common sense, someone needs to call this out: The quoted line of reasoning i

I know this is not how the law and precedents work in the USA, but for the sake of common sense, someone needs to call this out: The quoted line of reasoning is absolutely disingenuous when considered in a modern and realistic setting. What is being wilfully ignored is the change in quality of the information gleaned from the analysis of data as it is being done in bulk. Nobody in 1979 could have foreseen the sort of information that can be extracted from the unimaginably large fire-hose of metadata we generate today. It's a completely different thing if you had a list of who-called-who-when in 1979. How was this data kept? Well, for starters it probably wasn't centralized. Was it even digital? Probably, yes? Even if it was digital, the computers of that day could only handle trivial amounts of data. Factor in the ubiquity of phones and phone-usage today versus back then, to even consider the concept vaguely comparable is ridiculous. It's the difference between getting records from the electricity company so that you know which parts of your house were illuminated when, versus getting "records" from all the individual CCD elements of various cameras installed in your house so that you know the same thing, which (tiny) parts of your house were illuminated when. That's the same thing right? It's just a tiny bit more fine-grained (/s). Just because people might be okay with the former (say because you can see what lights are on from behind the curtains, on the street), doesn't mean they'd be fine with the latter. The quality, and therefore the privacy-expectations, of the information extracted from the data changes as you blow up the number of records by some orders of magnitude. Almost nobody from 1979 could have imagined what that would mean. Almost nobody could even have fathomed the amount of computational power a desktop computer could throw at it. Hell, not even most people today can grasp that. So there's "innocent" metadata that via some unfathomable process can be transmuted into some rather more detailed and revealing information. It's really quite hard to get a proper perspective on it (our brains aren't made for reasoning about graphs this size). I think it's more fair to call this process "magic", than otherwise. And in that case it really doesn't matter where it came from, say magic works, does it matter if the government knows all the details of your life from divining tea-leafs or divining phone metadata? Now add to this, that thanks to having sufficiently-advanced our technology, it is also possible, using similar techniques of "magic", for the phone companies to keep records for billing purposes in a really clever (magic/encrypted) way to shield the data from those kinds of divination while still being able to do their billing. The only reasonable expectation I have is for these paradigm shifts to be applied on both sides, equally.