Buried in the article is that no arrests were made and that warrants for wiretapping requests were down 25% overall in 2018.
However, warentless wiretapping was up 25%:
However, warentless wiretapping was up 25%:
The ODI's transparency report (the article's only citation, from which I have obtained every fact in this post) says that indeed went up from 129K targets in 2017 to 165k targets in 2018, but the article never mentions that. Instead, it talks about searching the recorded communications of those targets for communications related to US people who aren't being wiretapped themselves.
Except in the case of voluntary handovers, situations where the communication provider hands over data without the need of a warrant. A cop can purchase the same location or other data any advertiser can.
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/police-get-location-data-witho...
There is also no evidence that voluntary handovers are increasing.
The current location is known by necessity. There is no technical reason to keep a history of past locations.
Considering both of these terms are anachronisms originally created to describe distict devices which haven't been used in decades, getting bent out of shape over the difference between the two doesn't seem like a productive direction to steer the conversation.
As you allude to, seeing the forest instead of the trees reveals that people who are upset don't care how any of it works and they don't care which terms are assigned to which concepts. They care that their privacy is being violated. And no, they certainly don't care about court opinions concerning metadata not being data or call records not deserving privacy. The distinction between wiretaps, pen registers, and any other bullshit they dream up is not important to most people, so dragging the conversation into the weeds over the differences between the terms is not productive because it's a distinction without a meaningful difference (unless you're inclined to hassle privacy advocates.)
If somebody says "That man assaulted me; he punched me right in the face" the correct response is not "Actually that's battery, not assault"
(I don't know [or care] if that 'correction' is true or not, but it's one that's been repeated online ad nauseum.)
How come Julian Assange has second amendment protection?
Are you wondering whether this is interpreted to mean that Assange as an Australian has the right to own weapons in the US? Or did you mean to refer to some other amendment?