How Much Bulk Records Snooping Bypasses Judges?

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been indiscriminately collecting Americans’ phone records using sweeping bulk orders issued by a secret court has sparked enormous controversy. Yet we know that at least in the first few years after 9/11, something very similar occurred without any judicial process at all, as first reported by USA Today in 2006. Though that story was dwarfed at the time by the controversy over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretap program, it was actually the call records program that provoked a dramatic showdown between the White House and Justice Department, nearly triggering a mass resignation when the president threatened to reauthorize it over the objections of the acting attorney general that it was unlawful.

http://www.cato.org/blog/how-much-bulk-records-snooping-bypasses-judges