> what legal principle can we call upon to make this count in the court? It's already the case that different kinds of searches have different standards to obt

> what legal principle can we call upon to make this count in the court? It's already the case that different kinds of searches have different standards to obtain the information. The argument lies in convincing them of the truth: that this is a qualitative change in the type of search, not a merely quantitative change, ie, that they're not merely multiplying the number of a certain kind of search by a million (which could be the correct ruling, were the government using the information differently, as the court appears to believe they are), but rather, committing a fundamentally different type of search. > What you're trying to say is that of course a million people's phone records is totally different from one Not quite, it's a little more subtle: using a million people's phone records to correlate data and construct a graph not available without processing many of their records together is fundamentally a different activity than merely having a million records and looking through them each as if they were merely individual records. The NSA is analyzing the edges of the graph, and their relationships, not the node data directly; the court ruled that analyzing a million nodes is no different than analyzing one. I agree - however, it's not a relevant question to this case, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening on their part.