Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the NSA's bulk call records database as a "vital" counterterrorism tool. While this wouldn't make the program legal even if true, it also seems clear that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has relied, rather uncritically, on the government's assertions of "necessity" to draw the strained conclusion that every American's phone records are "relevant" to FBI counterterrorism investigations. It's thus worth pointing out how extraordinarily weak the case for the program's utility really is. Feinstein begins by recycling the claim that if only the NSA program...