Historically, here’s how it works: Suppose the police come to your door and say, “Hi, we’re investigating your neighbor for a crime and we would like to see the footage from your security camera for the last few days.” At that point, you can choose whether you share the records with the police. It’s up to you. You may demand to see a search warrant, but you do not need to. Your neighbor does not get a say in whether you help the police.

Here, the same pattern applies, but the scale of cooperation is staggering. “Quantity has a quality all its own,” on steroids. In the case of AT&T, their cooperation includes trillions of records and affects literally everyone who has used a phone since 1987.

The issue, according to the article, is not whether voluntary sharing of records is constitutional, but whether the public should have a right to know the details of how the system works.