Some blogs are suggesting the latest NSA domestic surveillance story is old news, and that the MSM is just pretending that this is a new story. See, e.g., Newsbusters, which is dedicated to "exposing and combating liberal media bias." I think a bit of clarification might be helpful here.

  As I see it, this story is really new, and is pretty different from the earlier NSA domestic surveillance stories from December and January. The earlier stories involved governmental tapping of telephone calls and e-mails when one party was outside the United States. That is, they involved the NSA recording the telephone calls and e-mails of people inside the United States from switches inside the United States when the other participant was outside the United States. Further, it seems that the government sharply limited that monitoring to a few hundred or a few thousand people, and only tapped calls when it had something like probable cause.

  Today's story is different. As best I can tell, it involves telephone companies disclosing account records of how their domestic customers were using their phones. In other words, the phone companies were disclosing lists of numbers dialed for domestic telephone subscribers to the NSA, rather than letting the NSA install switches and listen in on international calls. Further, they were doing this on a much larger scale: the disclosures were not pursuant to probable cause or reasonable suspicion. We don't know all the facts yet, but this looks new to me: It's non-content instead of content, broad scale instead of narrow, stored instead of real-time, provider disclosure instead of government tapping, and domestic accounts instead of intercepting traffic with at least one party overseas.