Less than two months ago, the British newspaper The Guardian told the world about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) standing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order to Verizon (and likely other telecommunications companies) asking them to routinely hand over all metadata for Americans’ phone calls.

But on Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)—the overseeing body for all American intelligence-gathering operations—decided to declassify a similar order among other previously top-secret documents.

This new order, according to the Washington Post, is the “formal order underlying the directive that was disclosed in June by Snowden.” Edward Snowden initially provided a copy of the Verizon metadata handover program to The Guardian.

The ODNI wrote on its website:

In the interest of increased transparency, the Director of National Intelligence has authorized the declassification and public release of the attached documents pertaining to the collection of telephone metadata pursuant to Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper has determined that the release of these documents is in the public interest.

Specifically, the ODNI released three previously top-secret documents, albeit with some redactions:

A 2013 “Primary Order for Business Records Collection,” (PDF) which the government argues is legal under Section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

A 2009 letter (PDF) from the assistant attorney general to the House Intelligence Committee detailing the NSA’s metadata “bulk collection program”

A 2011 letter (PDF) from the assistant attorney general to the House Intelligence Committee, which is nearly identical to its older counterpart

The 17-page "Primary Order" is signed by Roger Vinson, a federal judge who until May 3, 2013 served on the FISC. Vinson does not explain the executive or the judicial branch’s legal explanation or rationale. He also doesn't cite any case law.

“There are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to authorized investigations (other than threat assessments) being conducted by the FBI under guidelines approved by the Attorney General under Executive Order 12333 to protect against international terrorism, which investigations are not being conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” Vinson wrote in the document, dated April 25, 2013.

In the other two documents, the government claims its right to:

collect from telecommunications service providers certain business records that contain information about communications between two telephone numbers, such as the date, time, and duration of a call. There is no collection of the content of any telephone call under this program, and under longstanding Supreme Court precedent the information collected is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. In this program, court orders (generally lasting 90 days) are served on [REDACTED] telecommunications companies [REDACTED]. . . . Under the program based on the pen-trap provisions in FISA, the government is authorized to collect similar kinds of information about electronic communications—such as “to” and “from” lines in e-mail and the time an e-mail is sent—excluding the content of the e-mail and the “subject” line. Again, this information is collected pursuant to court orders (generally lasting 90 days) and, under relevant court decisions, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

A pen-trap, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is a condensed way of describing a “pen register,” or the phone numbers that you call. A “trap and trace device” records the numbers that call you. Both methods—via a FISC order to have the telecommunications companies hand over the data directly to the NSA as well as the government collecting that same metadata on their own—appear to be two different means to achieving the same end.

Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups (including the EFF) have been campaigning and litigating for a complete re-evaluation of this line of legal reasoning and policy.

"The order shows that the NSA use of the telephone calling information proceeds on autopilot—without FISA Court intervention—once a broad order is issued," Leslie Harris, the Center for Democracy and Technology's president and CEO, said in a statement. “The government, not the FISA Court, decides whether a particular person's phone number, and the phone numbers of everyone associated with that person, will be investigated through queries of this vast database. It is time to close down this disturbing process that clearly puts privacy and civil liberties on the back burner.”