In our view, the current storage by the government of bulk meta-data creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.
… there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the... telephony meta-data program.
The question is not whether granting the government [this] authority makes us incrementally safer, but whether the additional safety is worth the sacrifice in terms of individual privacy, personal liberty and public trust.
… the government should not be permitted to collect and store mass, undigested, non-public personal information.