Here is a related excerpt from Schneier's "Metadata = Surveillance" at https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-140... (on the same long web page as the previous "Surveillance by Algorithm").

"...we've been repeatedly assured by government officials that it's 'only metadata.' This might fool the average person, but it shouldn't fool those of us in the security field. Metadata equals surveillance data, and collecting metadata on people means putting them under surveillance."

"... Imagine that you hired a private detective to eavesdrop on a subject. That detective would plant a bug in that subject's home, office, and car. He would eavesdrop on his computer. He would listen in on that subject's conversations, both face to face and remotely, and you would get a report on what was said in those conversations. (This is what President Obama repeatedly reassures us isn't happening with our phone calls. But am I the only one who finds it suspicious that he always uses very specific words? 'The NSA is not listening in on your phone calls.' This leaves open the possibility that the NSA is recording, transcribing, and analyzing your phone calls -- and very occasionally reading them. This is far more likely to be true, and something a pedantically minded president could claim he wasn't lying about.)"

"Now imagine that you asked that same private detective to put a subject under constant surveillance. You would get a different report, one that included things like where he went, what he did, who he spoke to -- and for how long -- who he wrote to, what he read, and what he purchased. This is all metadata, data we know the NSA is collecting. So when the president says that it's only metadata, what you should really hear is that we're all under constant and ubiquitous surveillance."

"What's missing from much of the discussion about the NSA's activities is what they're doing with all of this surveillance data. The newspapers focus on what's being collected, not on how it's being analyzed -- with the singular exception of the Washington Post story on cell phone location collection. By their nature, cell phones are tracking devices. For a network to connect calls, it needs to know which cell the phone is located in. In an urban area, this narrows a phone's location to a few blocks. GPS data, transmitted across the network by far too many apps, locates a phone even more precisely. Collecting this data in bulk, which is what the NSA does, effectively puts everyone under physical surveillance."

"This is new. Police could always tail a suspect, but now they can tail everyone -- suspect or not. And once they're able to do that, they can perform analyses that weren't otherwise possible...."

In other words, they are trying to dance around the fact that "metadata" is collection of a _kind_ of surveillance data, not non-data or "not collected".

Scheier's blogs, articles and lectures on this topic are invaluable. He can explain what is happening because he is a true expert (and author of the classic technical tomb Applied Crytography). Whatever his personal politics and whether or not you agree with all his recommendations, he has extreme intelligence, insights, objectivity, honesty and integrity. He also has a very good basic approach in recognizing the kinds of things that NSA _should_ be doing as well as what it should not. He's not just going after the agency by 'making a case' through any means possible the way you expect lawyers and politicians to demagog it.

NSA is doing things and is capable of doing things that most people couldn't imagine. The extent of this scandal and its Constitutional implications are staggering, far more than what most people seem to realize.

Snowden was "coached" while a politician was "spontaneous"? I think not!

Sometimes the best approach is to try an informal approach first, seeking out a helpful clerk or lower official who will send you what you want without the formality of FOIA. When you submit a FOIA request to an agency, especially on a politically controversial topic, the bureaucrats go into "bunker mode". If you do use FOIA, you have to cite the exemptions for fees in the FOIA law which apply to you. Sometimes even with that you need to follow up using a cooperating non-profit law firm resubmitting your request along with "instructions" on what will happen to them if they try to charge for it.

But the way these agencies try to illegally hide information is legendary, ranging from refusing to return the certified mail return-receipt in order to dodge the fact that they received a request (a Federal agency is allowed to handle the receipt itself rather than have the post office do it), to denials in a response to you accompanied by the agency's rewriting of the FOIA law on their own behalf, to outright denials of documents they (and you) know they have. I have seen it all. In one instance they denied the existence of a document which I already had a part of from a leak and was trying to get the rest of. Sometimes these battles over a single request can go on for years with all kinds of chicanery, as been recently illustrated by Mark Levin's Landmark Legal Foundation and others over the EPA and IRS.

hear hear

Don't you think that by telling the world that we are monitoring all of their phone communications is giving aid and comfort to our enemies?

How is that important? The point of spying on your enemies is to keep you (the people) free. Spying on your own people just means you live in a police state.

Precisely so ... perfectly objective.