“The NSA does not need a court order to search the database it maintains of the call data surrendered by the nation’s telecommunications firms, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told reporters on Thursday”

“To search the database, you have to have reasonable, articulable cause to believe that that individual is connected to a terrorist group,” Feinstein told reporters. “Then you can query the numbers. There is no content. You have the name, and the number called, whether it’s one number or two numbers. That’s all you have… if you want to collect content, then you get a court order.”

“Asked to confirm that intelligence officials do not need a court order for the query of the number itself, Feinstein said, “that’s my understanding.”

“So even though the NSA or other intelligence agencies must return to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get authorization to eavesdrop on a call, they do not need to ask the court to search the “metadata” that NSA collects from telecom providers. Officials must only conclude for themselves that they have a “reasonable, articulable” suspicion about someone and then they may query their database.”

“”It is misunderstood that Americans’ private conversations — emails, phone calls — are being rummaged through by the government,” he said. “That is not true. Only when there is probable cause, given from a court order by a federal judge, can they go into the content of phone calls and emails in order to be able to disrupt a terrorist plot.”

politico.com

So, I think that some questions still remain:

Is the collection of “metadata” across all carriers all the time i.e every phone call in the US? How would it be useful otherwise? Then, how long do they keep it? If forever, is it worth preventing a few terrorist attacks against the US to have the Fed Govt keep forever, a database that records the metadata for everyone in the US?