I've read this piece and placed it in the bushes alongside a number of other op-eds on the subject. I know you will be tempted to say, "McNamara, she's a Georgetown professor with *state credentials here*," but her credentials do not allow her to make poorly reasoned arguments against policies she disagrees with. To put it simply, her saying that the fourth amendment was violated does not stand as evidence that a violation occurred.
Her article is purposely sloppy and misleading. She fails to make a distinction between the portion of PRISM meant to collect foreign intelligence and the portion meant to collect domestic metadata. Furthermore, when mentioning the collection of telephonic metadata, she glosses over the Supreme Court's decision regarding the reasonable expectation of privacy; thereby affording the argument no context and thus, no power. And finally, she refuses to properly and clearly convey the distinction between the interception and monitoring of content versus the collecting and analyzing metadata.
The average person reading this and other WAPO articles would believe that national security officials are going out and monitoring phone/internet content without meeting any sort of legal precedent sans a blanket FISA court order. This however, does not appear to be the case. But bet, there has been a lot of sloppy reporting and commentary over the past two weeks and most of it is rooted in begging the question in order to sensationalize the story.
As previously stated, this program is simply law enforcement 401 on a global scale.
