The big news of the day is that the NSA is and has been collecting metadata from Verizon about its customers’ phone calls and the news that both the NSA and the FBI are and have been collecting data from most of the big Internet Service Providers.

Color me unsurprised. Congress has willingly authorized this activity since 9/11 in one form or another. Notice Senator Chambliss’s reaction today:

“This is nothing particularly new,” Chambliss said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this, and to my knowledge we have not had any citizen who has registered a complaint relative to the gathering of this information.”

I’m not particularly happy about this, but there are very few Congressfolk in either house willing to vote down a Presidential request that the intelligence agencies collect data they claim might keep us safe from terrorists. It’s unfortunate, but it’s probably permanent.