MemeStreams | Surprising

It is not surprising, then, that intelligence and law enforcement agencies often turn first to metadata. Examining metadata is generally more cost-effective than analyzing content.

September, 2003:

Section 215 is one of the surprising lightning rods of the Patriot Act, engendering more protest, lawsuits, and congressional amendments than any other.
The DOJ argued to Congress that 215 is no big deal, since grand juries could always subpoena private records in the past.
To be sure, the ACLU is doing a bit of fearmongering when it says the DOJ can rifle through your records if they don't like what you're reading. If you're a U.S. citizen and not otherwise suspicious, you're probably safe, so long as all you do is read.

DOJ: 2007 - from A Review of the FBI's Use of Section 215 Orders (emphasis mine)

This standard, referred to as the relevance standard, permits the FBI to seek information concerning persons not necessarily under investigation but who are connected in some way to a person or entity under investigation...
As part of this review, Congress directed the OIG to identify "any noteworthy facts or circumstances concerning the use of business records requests, including any illegal or improper use of the authority..."
In the second instance of improper use, the FBI inadvertently collected certain telephone numbers pursuant to a pen register/trap and trace order because the telephone company did not advise the FBI that the target had discontinued using the telephone line until several weeks after the fact. The FBI identified the improperly collected information, removed it from its databases, and provided it to OIPR.

DOJ: 2013

Unlike ordinary criminal investigations, the sort of national security investigations with which Section 215 is concerned often have a remarkable breadth—spanning long periods of time, multiple geographic regions, and numerous individuals, whose identities are often unknown to the intelligence community at the outset. The investigative tools needed to combat those threats must be deployed on a correspondingly broad scale. In this context, it is not surprising that Congress enacted a statute with a standard that enables the FBI to seek certain records in bulk where necessary to identify connections between individuals suspected to be involved in terrorism.

Robert Chesney and Benjamin Wittes, Brookings Institution:

It may not be surprising that the government would want to have authority to generate such a database... But it is surprising to learn both that the government thinks it already has this authority under Section 215, and still more so that the FISA Court agrees and that members of Congress know this as well.

Orin Kerr, GWU

Certainly it’s surprising — and troubling — if the Section 1861 relevance standard is being interpreted at the database-by-database level.

Stewart Baker:

...the most surprising disclosure made by Edward Snowden – that NSA collects telephone metadata for all calls into, out of, or within the United States. Out of context – and Snowden worked hard to make sure it was taken out of context – this is a troubling disclosure. How can all of that data possibly be “relevant to an authorized investigation” as the law requires?

Alex Abdo, ACLU:

"When the court has in front of it only the government's arguments, it's not surprising that the opinion reads like a brief written by the government," he said.

Mieke Eoyang:

While the extent of the data collection may have been surprising to the public, it didn't surprise most lawmakers, Eoyang said.
That, however, wasn't the case with the disclosure that the NSA was monitoring Merkel's calls. "When the stories started breaking about Merkel and other foreign leaders, you had members of Congress feeling like, 'Why wasn't I aware of this," said Eoyang, the national security director at centrist Democratic group Third Way. "Congress doesn't like to be surprised."

Andrea Peterson interviewing Jim Sensenbrenner:

Since you were the author of the Patriot Act, you were at least at one point supportive of greater powers going to the intelligence community. Were the programs it has now been revealed the Patriot Act was used to justify particularly surprising to you? How else did you expect it to be implemented?
Clearly, they were very surprising to me. I can say that if Congress knew what the NSA had in mind in the future immediately after 9/11, the Patriot Act never would have passed, and I never would have supported it.

DNI, regarding DUAL_EC_DRBG:

It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries’ use of encryption.