I was under the same impression. I tried digging up some old news on the subject, to see where I got the impression from, but Google is only returning results from this latest news cycle.

Wasn't there a number of news stories in the past about the NSA collecting data from telecom companies and such. How is this time different?

EDIT: Found this, from May 2006: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...