One of the US constitution’s great strengths is its strong protection for privacy against government intrusion. One troubling feature, therefore, of the recently revealed collaboration between the National Security Agency and America’s global information providers is that the government has found a way to bypass the constitution. It uses weaknesses in legal protections that, in both the US and Europe, are intended to allow private companies to keep records on their clients while shielding citizens from prying by their governments.
American law privileges consumer sovereignty over human dignity, so it provides weak privacy protection against snooping by companies. They may create extensive dossiers on customers, and because they provide services globally but have systems anchored in the US, those data are subject to American government observation as well.
But, in US law, privacy is historically more robust when it comes to the government’s right to create similar dossiers. The kind of dragnet surveillance of phone metadata that the order to Verizon exposed would, in normal times, have triggered forceful resistance.