Regarding the original Veriz court order.. Answer me this: Does your phone number, or the fact that your particular string of numbers is a phone number, somehow exist in the universe with some sort of innate privacy apart from you? Nope. What exactly does a phone number, absent a name, address, billing info, or other customer info, mean to anyone, even the NSA.
The fact is that if you have someone's phone number, you generally have access to all that other information because linking it to a name and thus everything else is fairly trivial, even for ordinary people not affiliated with the NSA. Claiming it's somehow okay and protecting privacy because they have the phone numbers without names is ridiculous.
