As someone who aims to be a little more distrustful of government and believes that a healthy distrust should always be maintained, I am more shocked at the actual shock of the program rather than the details of the program itself.
Anyone paying attention to the Bush administration would have realized that numerous legislation and acts (Patriot, FISA, Protect America) had contained provisions that most civil liberties construed as potentially dangerous. And yet it is under Obama that a majority of people are now crying out at his stance on privacy and security.
And as for the technology, the potential for a program like PRISM has always been in place. The innovations that help search queries in Google or advertising organizations that can track your habits online (like googling gay porn and then finding your dash or sidebars loaded with gay dating sites afterwards) allow the NSA to sort through so much pieces of information quickly. (Interesting sidenote: that's how my friends found out I was gay, through the sidebars for advertisements when they glanced over. And again__funny how 'dating' sites showing up after looking for things like '
hard fuck' or '
cum swallow'...don't judge my online habits, the government does that already
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Which is the main reason for this topic, the supposed legality of the program. As much as our nature says it can be illegal or unconstitutional and against the fourth amendment of unreasonable searches and seizures, it might not be so easy to say that in regards to this notion. This is not to say that a bulwark of intelligence activities are not however. It would be hard to imagine somebody saying that investigations into specific individuals necessitates daily copies of information from a plethora of individuals.
The business powers provisions collects and logs calling information and email records, the metadata of it at least. Officials like Rand Paul classify it as illegal, but the history of the Supreme Court has changed in that regard. Business papers used to be treated the same as private papers, but when the regulatory scheme for business changed to be more all-encompassing, classifying them as the same would negate a lot of legislation regulating business.
US V Miller and Smith V Maryland extended this notion to financial records given to banks and telephone records. This has now developed the notion of the 'third party' doctrine of privacy. If you entrusted information about yourself to somebody else, or if you used technology that left a data trail (for instance in a corporate computer) you ran the risk of the information being made public, and thus you had no 'reasonable expectation' of privacy. Common sense, however, dictates that most people when searching for porn, or talking to a suicide-counselor or an attorney would expect an amount of discretion in that information.
This is where the problem lies, technology murking the waters of what was relatively simple law. In our information age, EVERYTHING practically leaves a data trail. Joining this site or a political organization or a book reading club creates a record of it for a third party. Things don't require physical searches anymore. By living in an era of modern technology, it would presuppose that most have unwittingly given up the right to say fourth amendment protection under current constitutional law. Unless the Fourth Amendment can be changed or reinterpreted for a modern age, programs like PRISM can be hard to critique.
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