No, the PATRIOT Act did not permit the NSA blanket record collection
This confirms what we had long suspected, says Cindy Cohn, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization that has long accused the government of operating a secret dragnet surveillance program. Weve been suing over this since 2006.
The order is based on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to obtain a wide variety of business records, including calling records. EFF has long criticized Section 215, which sets a threshold for obtaining records much lower than the probable cause standard required to get a search warrant.
But Cohn argues that the kind of dragnet surveillance suggested by the Verizon order exceeds even the authority granted by the Patriot Act.
Section 215 is written as if theyre going after individual people based on individual investigations, she says. In contrast, the order leaked to the Guardian affects millions and millions of innocent people. Theres no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/05/nsa-asked-verizon-for-records-of-all-calls-in-the-u-s/