"You usually do a good job covering this topic but this article is not up to your usual standard. You portray the court's opinion as tautological - "And now the courts essentially maintain that the original surveillance is legal because Congress says it's legal" - but this is a misleading and unfair caricature. The background of this case is that this 2nd Circuit panel said that bulk collection of metadata was illegal because Congress never authorized such a tactic under the Patriot Act. Note that the court said it was illegal because it was not statutorily authorized. It did not conclude the program violated a constitutional clause, right or principle. You conflate these two very different things when you write in your article:
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So how could something so seemingly unconstitutional continue? Congress said it could, that's how.
Statutorily unauthorized is not the same thing as unconstitutional - the panel never said in their original ruling that the bulk metadata collection was unconstitutional, only that it was unauthorized by the law the government cited for its legality.
Now, in this latest ruling, the 2nd Circuit panel is saying with the recent passage of the Freedom Act, Congress has provided the authorization that was missing under the Patriot Act for the bulk metadata collection. So yes, in a sense, the previously illegal bulk collection program is now legal because Congress says it's legal but that's not twisted logic - that's how laws work. Acts are legal or illegal because the legislative body says so. Previously, the court said the metadata program wasn't authorized by the law - now, the new revised law provides that authorization. There's nothing twisted about that legal reasoning.
To be clear, I oppose the metadata collection or the indiscriminate NSA surveillance. But I do not think this article fairly summarize the reasoning in the court's opinion."