The author conflates unrelated issues.
The first seems intentionally misleading:
“Then why worry that your cell phone data records are stored on a massive supercomputer in Utah, where they can be routinely downloaded and searched?”
That is NOT how it works!
The collected phone data only shows which numbers were in contact, when, and for how long.
There is NO CONTENT to be “searched”!
Frankly, I do not believe them on this. The ‘metadata’ is already stored by the vendors and if they need it they can get that from them with a FISA warrant.
They can even coerce some to the vendors to give them the feed directly - they have in the past. I also believe that even though they are looking for connections between foreign terrorists and Americans they even have the right to capture and examine everyone’s private communications. It’s fishing.
It just doesn’t wash. It didn’t wash with Clapper’s ‘inadvertent’ lie to Congress that he had to walk back, the need for a UTAH memory superhouse for call overhead data doesn’t wash, and the reauthorization of the Patriot Act under a new name (USA Freedom Act) that promulgates that national surveillance down to state and local LE levels doesn’t wash.
They’ve lost my trust and my believability regarding what they say now.