It was recently made public that the NSA has a far-reaching initiative called PRISM that is intended to mine vast amounts of data under the guise of protecting Americans from threats. As part of this, metadata on American citizens' phone calls has been collected from at least one major phone provider as well as a variety of web sites without the consent of the parties who own the data.
No matter how effective it proves in deterring terrorism or other threats in this country, it is far too invasive, and millions of law-abiding Americans were recently terrified to discover that the government was doing this. We urge the Obama administration to end these programs promptly in favor of strategies that respect Americans' rights to privacy