As such, Congress currently has no idea how many warrantless requests are made to ISPs each year. How can it hope to make sane policy in this area, when it has no useful data?

The Intelligence select committee knows pretty well what's going on. That's why Mark Udall and Ron Wyden were screaming bloody murder last month before the patriot act extension vote [1]. Because they know, and it's bad.

It seems much of the uproar is about the business records portion and how it is being applied to broad requests to telcos for call detail records without suspicion of terrorism. Often that will be all of the target's call detail records, and then the call detail records of everyone he calls, and very possibly even the CDR's of everyone those people called. You don't have to make that many of those requests before you essentially have the entire country's phone records in one great big database.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/us/27patriot.html

... And the lords of the surveillance state said in unison, "Long live the emergency!"

Wow-- this is an increase from 17 in 2008 to 91 in 2009. I would have guessed that both were several orders of magnitude higher.

Here's the thing though - if people aren't going to revolt when the TSA literally gropes their genitals, there is little else they are going to protest, certainly not something far less tangible.

In fact, it's the opposite - we have common people who react by defending the TSA doing this to millions for the single idiot they might catch someday. Now it has spread to bus stations, trains and even roadblocks - and still, no-one protests.

So this will never be defeated, even if the headlines of every newspaper and news program tomorrow was "government saving every email that everyone has ever sent or received".

As long as they can go shopping at the mall or go fishing on the weekends, they have the illusion they are "free" and don't mind all the war and unreasonable intrusions into their privacy.