When I first saw this suit I ignored it, but it may have more merit than I originally thought.

the government itself has now acknowledged and confirmed many of the key facts about the NSA’s upstream surveillance, including the fact that it conducts suspicionless searches of the contents of communications for information “about” its targets. These facts fundamentally change the standing equation: now we know that the NSA isn’t surveilling only its targets, but it’s instead surveilling everyone, looking for information about those targets. Finally, the volume of the plaintiffs’ international communications is so incredibly large that there is simply no way the government could conduct upstream surveillance without sweeping up a substantial number of those communications. In short, the plaintiffs in Wikimedia v. NSA have standing because the NSA is copying and searching substantially all international text-based communications, including theirs.

If its content, its not metadata, so all the rationalizations about metadata go out the window. We're talking about US to foreign traffic. Although the border search exemption is extremely broad, allowing for this would undermine all the rationalizations from the courts over the years that there is some limit to it. Whats that leave?

1. Richard Posner's fucked up argument that the 4th Amendment doesn't prohibit robots from watching you because they don't have emotions.

2. The idea that there is a general "intelligence collection" exception to the fourth amendment.

3, The idea that the Constitution requires the exact minimization procedures that happen to be in place. How prescient of them.

Either way, it'll be fun to watch.