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" A federal judge this afternoon said that a great number of people owe apologies to Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage. Glenn Greenwald was crowing a bit about it on MSNBC this afternoon. He&amp;#039;s earned that right. Most importantly, he says that the NSA&amp;#039;s policy has direct harmful effects on Verizon subscribers because it violates their constitutional rights - a marked contrast from previous rulings. That&amp;#039;s partly because Leon determined that an important case involving telephone metadata no longer applies in a world in which your phone can track almost every aspect of your life. &amp;quot;The Government, in its understandable zeal to protect our homeland, has crafted a counterterrorism program with respect to telephone metadata that strikes the balance based in large part on a thirty-four-year-old Supreme Court precedent, the relevance of which has been eclipsed by technological advances and a cellphone-centric lifestyle heretofore inconceivable,&amp;quot; he writes. The case he&amp;#039;s talking about is Smith v. Maryland, a landmark case involving less than a week of surveillance of one subject&amp;#039;s landline. This ruling allows the case to proceed, and Leon also ordered the government to cease collecting any metadata from the plaintiffs and destroy any that remained in surveillance databases. Practically, though, this doesn&amp;#039;t mean much, since that order has been delayed to allow the government time to file an appeal. Let us be clear. No matter what you think of Snowden, or Glenn Greenwald, and no matter what you think of what they did, this ruling does not happen if the NSA doesn&amp;#039;t let a contractor walk out of the joint with the family jewels on a flash drive. This ruling does not happen if we do not know what we now know, and we don&amp;#039;t know any of that unless Snowden gathers the data and leaks it to the Guardian. This entire country was founded after a revolution that was touched off to a great extent by the concept of individual privacy. Last week, I mentioned James Otis and the Writs of Assistance, but today it&amp;#039;s worth citing it verbatim:  I renounced that office and I argue this cause from the same principle; and I argue it with the greater pleasure, as it is in favor of British liberty, at a time when we hear the greatest monarch upon earth declaring from his throne that he glories in the name of Briton and that the privileges of his people are dearer to him than the most valuable prerogatives of his crown; and as it is in opposition to a kind of power, the exercise of which in former periods of history cost one king of England his head and another his throne. I have taken more pains in this cause than I ever will take again, although my engaging in this and another popular cause has raised much resentment. But I think I can sincerely declare that I cheerfully submit myself to every odious name for conscience&amp;#039; sake; and from my soul I despise all those whose guilt, malice, or folly has made them my foes. Let the consequences be what they will, I am determined to proceed. The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country.  A lot of the rest of the speech exists only in the notes taken by a young Boston lawyer in whom Otis lit a fire. His name was John Adams: He asserted that the security of these rights to life, liberty, and property had been the object of all those struggles against arbitrary power, temporal and spiritual, civil and political, military and ecclesiastical, in every age. He asserted that our ancestors, as British subjects, and we their descendants, as British subjects, were entitled to all those rights by the British constitution as well as by the law of nature and our provincial character as much as any inhabitant of London or Bristol or any part of England, and were not to be cheated out of them by any phantom of &amp;quot;virtual representation&amp;quot; or any other fiction of law or politics or any monkish trick of deceit and hypocrisy. Judge Richard Leon -- an appointee of C-Plus Augustus, who nonetheless whacked his patron around on Guantanamo Bay -- has now said that the concept exists no matter what technologies are devised to overcome it. Quite simply, there is no more important debate to be had on the historical nature of what an American is. It comes to us from our very beginnings. Privacy is central to who we were, and to who we are, as a democratic self-governing people If it is obsolete then, frankly, so are we. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30765/nsa-surveillance-court-ruling-121613/>