would have been a better headline, it turns out. The provisions that were just struck down, which supposedly came from the Patriot Act, actually traces back to an amendment that liberal Democratic senator Patrick Leahy made in 1986. The national security letter, he said at the time, was a “clear procedure for access to telephone toll records in counterintelligence investigations” (Congressional Record, Oct. 1, 1986, p. 27633). None of which changes my view that the court got the law wrong, for the reasons Orin Kerr goes through at volokh.com.