Are Internet Backbone Pen Registers Constitutional?

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Julian Sanchez writes:

Between Edward Snowden’s ongoing leaks and a series of frankly unprecedented disclosures by the government itself, the public now knows quite a bit about the NSA’s controversial telephony metadata program, which makes use of the Patriot Act’s §215 to collect, in bulk, nearly all Americans’ domestic  call detail records from telephone carriers.  We know far less, however about the government’s bulk collection of Internet metadata under FISA’s pen register/trap-&-trace authority, which supposedly ceased in 2011—though some such collection almost certainly continues in a more limited form.

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