After the Church Committee, it is very difficult for the government to do illegal things and for it to remain a secret. That's why in all of Snowden's leaks, he revealed only a single extant illegal program, and its legality wasn't so clear that it couldn't be argued in court.

Beyond that, you ignored my previous argument. If they were already doing this, why bother to collect metadata from taps?

Oh this is such absolute misinformation. The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing which means you need to not only prove you were spied on but that it also 'materially' affected you. And in order to do so you generally need to have reasonable justification to engage in discovery - in order to get the data from the NSA themselves. At that point the NSA simply declares 'nah, national security or something', discovery becomes impossible, you can't prove anything, and the case is dismissed.

These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment, but the structure of our legal system makes it effectively impossible to legally challenge them.

> The reason court cases against the NSA spying (and other related issues) fail is because you need to prove standing. These programs all overtly violate, amongst other things, the 4th amendment.

This is pure ignorance. If it actually sucked up everybody's data, everybody would have standing. Snowden's leaks showed that they don't, that only the phone metadata program did.